We have relatives in California. They say just before an earthquake is an eerie stillness. Everything hushed. Birds suddenly stop chirping. Barking dogs become silent. Even the leaves on trees hang quietly as if they too are listening to a barely audible distant tremor. That’s what it is like this Sunday morning so close to Christmas, so close to the birth of the Christ child, so close to the moment all creation breaks forth in song and ushers the dawn of a new era. The image of an earthquake today? It may not be just a preacher’s fancy. According to Mary in her Magnificat things will literally be turned upside down: “he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. Brought down the powerful from their thrones, lifted up the lowly; filled the hungry with good things, sent the rich empty-handed away.”

Mary, speechless when Gabriel appeared and told her what was about to happen, now breaks forth in a torrent of praise and description and wonder at the new Messiah. Her song is no sweet lullaby but, says one biblical scholar, a war cry and battle hymn. There is nothing private or inner or subjective about what God intends to do. For God is moving politically, economically, strategically. Those in power are to be brought down. The lowly and oppressed lifted up. A great transfer of power is taking place. It will make the transition in Washington look superfluous. The earthquake image may not be far from the mark this fourth Sunday of Advent, this eve of a new millennium.

Perhaps some of us have been like hyper-active birds or barking dogs this holiday season. I invite you one last time to enter into the stillness of Advent. Tune your heart and ears and mind to the deep rumblings of the Holy Spirit of God bringing about a new era for the human family, bringing about the transformation of your life.

Flannery O’Conner – that wonderful, strange, eccentric genius of a writer was tuned in. She once said, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” She probably knew it as well as anyone. Her stories of faith and violence and grace are mini-earthquakes themselves. Disturbing, upsetting, profound. Because she was odd Flannery O’Conner had a peculiar way of seeing things. She suffered from lupus which finally took her life when she was in her forties; suffered from the unrequited love of a broken heart. And suffered the rejection of being a serious Roman Catholic in Georgia’s 1950s Bible-belt culture. Flannery O’Conner didn’t buy the religious or political hooey of the day that redefined reality to fit the oppressive racial systems of the South or power structures of the North. Rather she trumpeted God’s reality to the systems and structures of her time that cemented over truth and justice.

The challenge of Advent is to be open to God’s truth which, says the Bible, is contrary to the world. But we build our lives on the world’s shifting foundations. Relationships and careers built on such values and behaviors, says Mary today, will be turned upside down. I am reading a wonderful story entitled Snow in August. It is the story of a young boy growing up in a post-WWII Brooklyn Irish Catholic ghetto. It is the story of the deeply entrenched intimidation and fear and violence that allowed the oppression of Jews and women in that community in the late 1940s.  That story could be written about virtually any one of our neighborhoods at any time of history. Fear and raw ambition drive so much of our living. That’s why it takes an earthquake to get our attention, set things right.

Or a Flannery O’Conner. Or a Mary and her Magnificat. Or sometimes you run into someone for whom the façade and pretensions of life have been broken away like the rubbled black-top of an earthquake-strewn California highway. You encounter some person or story or event which is true in some way that shatters day to day life as we know it. That challenges our propped up living. And for a brief moment at least you feel awkward, out of place. Strange. You catch a glimpse of the truth and the truth does make you odd.

The other night Carol and I had such an encounter with the truth. We were walking down Elmwood Avenue. The air was cold. We passed along some closed storefronts. It was late. A young man we’d never seen before or since in our neighborhood was sitting on a bench. He called out “do you want to buy some jewelry, tonight?” We stopped to look. He was in his early twenties maybe older. Scruffy. Bearded. Matted looking. Army surplus. Could have been homeless. Several small pieces of jewelry he’d made were laid out on a black velvet cloth draped across his leg. He talked rapidly, incessantly, like he’d had too much caffeine. Several of his teeth were missing.

He was odd. He made sense and he didn’t make sense. He talked about not being able to last much longer doing what he was doing. It’s a crazy world we live in he said – at least here in the United States. At no point did I feel he expected anything from us other than  to take him seriously and listen. He said he lived in an attic with no light or heat and said it without a shred of self-pity or remorse. He was interesting and bright and talented and lost. And he was oddly illumined by some flame of truth still flickering within him. His aim, jewelry making he told us, was to get to India. Some place so different from here, was my sense of it, that perhaps he wouldn’t be living in a constant state of disharmony and awkwardness. This young man was on the margin of what we might call acceptable society, but it was also clear that he knew some deep truth that made him odd. Poets and prophets rarely “fit in.” As we stepped back to leave he reached out his hand, “my name is Eric,” he said. We reached for his hand, introduced ourselves and said goodnight. As we walked away I said to Carol, “What an interesting, tragic person,” “Yes,” she said, “and someone out there is his mother.” And someone his father, I thought.

In one sense, Eric has little in common with Mary and her Magnificat or Flannery O’Conner. But there is another sense in which there is a connection between them. Each one of them shares the curse of captivity and the blessing of hope. Each knows the darkness of oppression and searches for the light of deliverance.

A friend of mine, pastor of a congregation in another city shared the tragic news that the two-year old daughter of an active couple in his congregation died recently.  There was no explanation for the death. Theories but no conclusive cause. The parents and the little girl’s siblings are what you might call a perfect family. Talented professionals. Bright. Handsome. Kind and gracious.  My friend observed that this was the first utter defeat they experienced. A situation for which their brilliance and grace and hard work could do nothing. “I don’t know, ultimately how they will respond,” he said. “It will be the making or breaking of them.”

Captivity comes in many forms. Alcoholics Anonymous puts it this way: “We are powerless to help ourselves. We had to reach out to a higher power.” If you have never had debts you couldn’t pay, a cancer that won’t heal, a marriage that can’t be fixed, a problem that defies solving the message this fourth Sunday of Advent will make little sense to you. But the paradox of late Advent is if you’ve ever been in such circumstances or find yourself facing them now, there is hope for you today.

You see, here on the fourth Sunday of Advent we have run out of options. For some of us – like for that couple – deliverance right now at least as we know and have accomplished it ourselves in the past is inconceivable. Some choose the stiff upper lip of stoicism or intellectual scorn. The deities of the thinking, respectable people. C.S. Lewis said, if you are not going to be a Christian, the next best thing is to be a Stoic.

But some of us, like Eric or that family whose daughter died, know that we are in the cul de sac of a dead end. Eking it out with barely enough light and heat. Convinced things cannot go on like this much longer. In such times we discover the truth that our redemption, our healing, our wholeness has to come from outside of us. And we become odd to all those who still think they can manage the complexities and mysteries of life themselves. So if you are today at one of those dead ends or ever have been then you know what the fourth Sunday of Advent is all about. It is eagerly awaiting the entrance of hope and new life – the supreme gift of a gracious God.

Hear the promise: if you are at the end of your tether, painfully aware that you cannot make happen what needs to happen, you are living in a fourth-Sunday-of-Advent world. The good news this morning is that God has come, God is coming, and God will come to redeem your devastation. That is what the Christmas festival we gather for tonight proclaims.

Amen.