When it was first recorded that passage in Isaiah was a reference to Cyrus, the king of Persia. King Cyrus broke the yoke of the Babylonians and gave the Israelites the possibility of freedom from their captivity in Babylon. But by the time Mark's Gospel was written early Christians saw other connections. For them a line extended from the words in Isaiah to the person of John the Baptizer and beyond John to Jesus, whom they called the Christ.

The Scriptures are like a dot to dot picture that stretches across vast time and territories. In order to perceive the outlines of God's intentions we need to connect the dots - and not just the ones that trace events in times gone by but those that mark moments in our own lifetime. In the second letter of Peter the author states that God's sense of timing is different than ours- "one day is like a thousand years, a thousand years are like one day".

In this age of instant gratification we can draw the wrong conclusions about God's engagement with the world if we judge God's actions on an inadequate time scale. For as it goes on to say in Peter's letter, "The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some of you think about slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance."

God's patience with humanity extends even to the Second Sunday in Advent 2005. The dots are still being placed and new connections wait to be perceived. God is sketching out the latest invitation to draw nearer to Him even as we sit here. The call to repentance is still being issued and people are still turning - slowly, slowly - from the life they have known to the life that God offers.

Let us accompany the Gospel in its leap backward to the time of the Babylonian Captivity and then follow the lines forward to our own day. Let us be alert to the intentions of God in history and listen for the invitation of God in our life.

Beginning in 598BC the Babylonians swept in from the east in three waves. They thundered across the Jordan River, stormed into town and took the leaders and the learned out of Jerusalem. Those Israelites were moved almost five hundred miles west of their temple and their homes. Once long ago, in the Exodus, they had crossed the Jordan River in freedom to enter the Promised Land.

Now they crossed the water in chains leaving the land they had been promised to live in exile in Babylon. The Israelites viewed their capture as a punishment. They had put their hopes in military might and foreign alliances instead of in their God and now they were under judgment.

Although the Israelites were allowed to own land in Babylon, participate in trade, and to continue to worship they were strangers in a strange land. But by the time King Cyrus of Persia showed up on the scene, life for the Israelites in Babylon was well organized, endowed with creature comforts and offered considerable freedoms. Maybe life in captivity wasn't so bad. Then a word came from God.

The prophet Isaiah presented words that moved from lament to hope, from condemnation to pardon, from captivity to freedom. But the way to this freedom lay in another journey through the desert. The desert was scorching hot by day and freezing cold by night. There were bandits and sandstorms and nameless dangers that moaned and skulked in the dark. The Israelites wouldn't be travelling under the protection of an army and their mixed group of men women and children could be easy prey. God had said "go back to Jerusalem." The way led through the desert. Were they willing to put their trust God this time?

The need to travel in trust wouldn't end when they arrived at their final destination. The walls of Jerusalem had been breached and burned in the initial attack by the Babylonians. The gates were pulled down. The Temple had been stripped of its vessels and the finest homes in town had been burned to the ground. The Babylonians had passed through the city like a hurricane. The ramshackle shape of Jerusalem could be compared to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Nothing was left unscathed. Rubbish heaps were in the streets. The infrastructure was in a shambles. Everyone who knew how to do something of value had been displaced so there couldn't have been much of an economy. Why would anyone leave the comforts of Babylon for the challenges of Jerusalem? -Because their willingness to take the journey symbolized their acceptance of God's invitation to a restored relationship. Those who left Babylon for the ruins of Jerusalem were re-entering the promise, walking again by faith and not by their own vision alone.

Lets pull back to include more of the dots that stretch across the pages of scripture and see what shape or patterns we might perceive. Five hundred years after the Babylonians stormed Jerusalem people were again leaving the city to journey through the wilderness. This time they left of their own free will and when they reached the banks of the Jordan River, they stopped.

They stood in the water and listened to a man dressed in the camel skins of a prophet. John told them to reorient their lives. He called them away from the familiar and the comfortable and bade them get ready for a new relationship with God. Wash in the water of the river as a sign of repentance but make a highway in the desert for the Lord, John said. Such highways were prepared for the passage of a King. But John was not talking about Cyrus of Persia. John anticipated the coming of a far more powerful liberator. "I have washed you with water but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit," John promised.

It is God's desire to keep drawing us out of our captivities, however comfortable they may be. Whether we are in Babylon, Jerusalem, or greater Baltimore there is always a desert between the known way and the Promised Land. There is also always a river that runs through it.

Sometimes we can walk into the desert under our own strength and sometimes we are carried through it by a river of grace. This day is just one dot in a far bigger picture. Trust that God in acting in all things, through all things, and for our good. God is at work in our world and in our life whether we can see it or not. Each Advent we are invited to let God be God and to let that be enough.