Sometimes it seems that way. I remember my fourth grade Sunday School teacher. "Screwy Louis" we called him. We were only imitating our parents. They called him that too. Louis was a farmer, just like the rest of the people in our church. Then, one year, he met a Bible teacher who had everything down on charts and graphs and maps. He had worked everything out, and all of his research proved that Jesus would be coming back in just six months!

So Louis sold his farm, pulled his children out of school, and bought a motor home. They joined a caravan of Christians who traveled across North America warning everybody they met. In the sixth month they parked their motor homes together, built campfires, sang songs and scanned the skies looking for Jesus.

But He didn't come. Then the money ran out, and they got restless. One by one they drifted off, bitter and disillusioned.

"Screwy Louis" came back to our community, but He hid himself out of sight. We heard that He got sick. When He died, people said it was from a broken heart.

How do we live in Advent? How do we live in the expectation of Jesus' return without becoming a "Delta Dawn" or a "Screwy Louis"? How does Advent expectation stay real and fresh and honest and meaningful in our lives, without turning into something strange or wacky or weird?

John Henry Newman gave a beautiful image in one of his sermons. He said that in the Old Testament the prophets pulled the people of Israel along on a road that ran straight out toward the horizon. It began at the dawn of creation, and marched through the history of God's Covenant love. It pointed them up ahead to something dark and ominous and climactic. They called it "The Day of the Lord."

The prophets said that Day would be one of reckoning, a day when evil would be judged and God's people would be rescued from all the terror that gripped them. Most of all, said the prophets, it will be a day when God steps out of heaven and comes down to visit us and shows himself to us in a whole new way.

Well, we know what happened, said Newman. The prophets were right. The Day of the Lord arrived, just like they said it would. But here's the funny thing: nobody even realized it! No big ball of fire from heaven. No earthquakes and cosmic storms. No sounds of battle or terrors of plagues.

The Day of the Lord came quietly. So quietly, in fact, that God had to put out a special news bulletin in the nighttime skies over Bethlehem or everybody would have missed it! Even that ad came on so late in the late, late show that only a few shepherds out in the fields saw it!

The Day of the Lord came, but it wasn't what people had expected. Do you remember how George Herbert put it?

They all were looking for a King

To slay their foes and lift them high;

Thou cames't, a little Baby-thing,

That made a woman cry.

The Day of the Lord came, but it came like a whisper rather than a wind; it came like a tinkling bell rather than a loud, crashing cymbal; it came like dew on the morning grass rather than a thunderstorm cloudburst. And in the quiet of Bethlehem's manger, God stepped into our world.