So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away. See: everything has become new! – 2 Corinthians 5.17

KINGDOM LIFE. That’s what we’re about in our worship today: and every day, actually. Kingdom life. That’s what the Eucharist is for, and about.

“Not everything has a name”, wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Some things lead us into the realm beyond words … It is like that small mirror in the fairy tales … You glance in it and what you see is not yourself; for an instant you glimpse the Inaccessible, where no horse or magic carpet can take you. And the soul cries out for it.”

In Eucharist we bring our simple offering. Few of us will become leaders of nations; few of us will be great prophets, priests or kings. But here we take heart. Here we look to a Kingdom that requires faith no greater than a mustard seed!

The Kingdom of God is of a different order entirely when compared to the kingdoms of this world. The effect of God’s Kingdom at work in our lives will never be measured in material goods, or status, or popularity.

We will never know the good we have done with simple acts of kindness and love. With the simple flap of our spiritual wings, we may well change the divine dimension of our world forever. That is the parable of our lives.

The Kingdom is at work in the smallest cell of our body and every tiny breath of our spirit, wrote Frank Hegedus.

That’s why E H Sears—and your parish priest—repeat the words: “hush the noise … and hear the angels sing.” May it not be said by Christ’s family in Bramhall: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”

The Kingdom — wrote the Welsh priest and poet, R S Thomas …

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

Faith the size of a mustard seed! God grant us that grace. For with Bishop John Taylor “I believe there is nothing more needed by humanity today … than the recovery of a sense of “beyondness” in the whole of life to revive the springs of wonder and adoration.”