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In the Church’s calendar, we’ve moved from ‘After Trinity’ to ‘Before Advent’. And in these weeks ‘Before Advent’ there is a focus on the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom shared with ‘The angels and saints, and all the company of heaven’.

So, our focus during these Sundays Before Advent is through a wide-angle lens – we are not focussing on a moment in time, or even a moment out of time, but on the whole sweep of God’s activity, all that he has done and planned, from the very beginning of time itself, until the time when time itself will come to an end.

Now our first reading this evening, from I Kings, telling of the end of David’s Reign and the beginning of Solomon’s, is connected to this train of Kingdom thought, but I want to concentrate instead on the second reading, from the first chapter of the Apocalypse, the Revelation of St John the Divine. The Book of Revelation comes up a lot in our lectionaries at this time of the year, both on Sundays and during the week, as it has a broad concern for the whole of God’s activities, even while concentrating on particular Churches in particular times.

John has this amazing, mystical vision, full of imagery, some wonderful, some weird, much of it very difficult to interpret, some parts very conducive to our modern thought, some very alien from it. But it is certainly a vision with a grand sweep. It was a much disputed book when the final list for the New Testament came to be drawn up some 400 years after Christ, but the Church in its wisdom, guided by the Holy Spirit, came to see that the New Testament would be much poorer if this apocalyptic book were omitted, and so it has been an important part of the Holy Scriptures since then. It makes a very fitting climax to the whole of the New Testament, and indeed, to the whole of the Holy Scriptures.

We’ll just note one or two points from these verses to begin with. John writes to the seven Churches in the province of Asia – he’s writing from the Greek Island of Patmos to specific Churches at a specific time. This part of the book comprises pastoral letters, supporting, challenging, guiding the Churches for which he feels in some way responsible. We know some but not all of the background into which he is writing, and so some of the references are not always clear to us now.

And he’s writing from God, from the seven spirits before his throne, from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth. Immediately, the theme of the Kingdom of God is introduced – the Church is not separate from the world, it is an integral part of it. And he is writing to those who have been made ‘a kingdom of priests to serve his God and Father’. We, the people of faith, the saints here, have been made a kingdom of priests, ordained for the service of God.

But, in particular, I want us to notice the broad context in which John sets his specific writings to the seven Churches in the province of Asia. ‘Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come.’ ‘‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God’. John writes his specific instructions to the Churches from the context of reflecting on a God who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first cause and the final destination of all things.

There is a tendency for us as Christians to focus on important but limited goals and sometimes to forget the wider picture. Often we focus on particular Churches, as St John does, but forget the whole sweep of God’s amazing grace and providence which began before the beginning of time, remains patiently with us throughout the whole of time, and will still be there after time has ended. Quite rightly, we focus on the Church here, on the life of this Cathedral, making and growing disciples here, our ministry and mission here; if we have spare capacity, we might think about the Church in the Diocese, or the world-wide Anglican Communion, or the mission of the Church in specific other parts of the world, such as our friends in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC; we might think about Kingdom issues, such as poverty, fair trade, the protection of our environment, how we create a healthy society; we might concentrate on moral issues, such as euthanasia, abortion, same-sex marriage, corporate finance, and so on. But, as we are reminded at this time of the year, we need to do all of this in the context of the broad sweep of God’s concern, which stretches from the beginning to the end, for he is the one who ‘was, and is, and is to come’.

The Christian life and faith has an emphasis on the cosmic as well as the personal. God cares for each of us individually, and died on the Cross for each of us individually, but he cares also for the whole of creation, and he longs for everything to be drawn to him. He loved everything into being, and he continually pours that love into his creation, hoping that everything will respond to that love and recognise him as the loving creator of all. ‘Yours, lord, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the splendour and the majesty, for all things come from you, and of your own do we give you’.

And so, in this Kingdom Season, we marvel at the wonders of God’s creation, at everything he has made, from the tiniest atomic particles to the most enormous galaxies; we wonder at the infinitesimally small distances in the atoms which make up our bodies, and the infinitely large distances that the light from the stars travels to reach us and brighten up our night sky. We gasp at the enormously long stretches of time, and the eternity before and after time, in which God has patiently waited, watched, created, sustained, and loved us into being. And we worship and adore him, ‘who was, and is, and is to come,’ the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, but who still has an individual concern for each creature he has made, so that not even a sparrow can fall without our Father caring about it.

We live in an amazing God-filled universe, and we are invited to share in amazing God-filled lives, and to be sent out for service from an amazing God-filled Church, so that the whole world may share in that fulness of life which he has promised. AMEN.