I remember one year in our church in Tacoma, we did something strange for a little, inner-city Baptist church. People were curious, asked questions and some were even annoyed but we somehow got away with it. A week later, the sanctuary was resplendent in color, texture and light. I was in a robe with liturgical vestments and colors. The same people were still annoyed but the rest got it.
Advent is about something unexpected.
Nobody expected that God would really, actually show up as he did. No one had ever really figured out how it would happen. No one dared to believe it was going to happen this year , the Word become flesh among us, for real. So, at the dawn of the single most important moment in human history, two millennia ago, almost no human eyes were focused on the right place. Like our eyes are too quickly focused on Washington D.C. or on Wall Street, or Austin, Texas, on London or the Hague, the eyes in the first century focused on Rome and on Jerusalem.