You may have noticed that Sue and I have been on holiday for the past four weeks. It was a wonderful time of restoration, of re-creation and rediscovery of friends and relationships going back many years. As we travelled from place to place, from Sydney to Melbourne, from Melbourne to Adelaide, from Adelaide to Sydney and then to the Hunter Valley and back; as we travelled, mostly by train, we tried to keep in touch with the news.

It all seemed disastrous - murders and rapes, suicides and financial crashes. A stranger from another planet would think that the people of earth spent all their time harming themselves and each other. I can tell you, that after a few days I didn't open the paper, or watch the television or search the web-pages. I sat in the train and watched the world go by.

I love travelling by train - you don't have to worry about other traffic; you can get up and walk about, and we were regularly fed delicious meals. The train was an hour late at Lithgow on the way home, and the steward apologised to us. "No no," we replied, "You can be as late as you like, we'd like to ride in this train as long as we possibly can!" Of course the train arrived at Central Station and we had to alight and face the real world. You can see a lot from the window of a train, but you can't see everything, and even the things you can see flash past quickly; you cannot stop and feel and smell and taste thing, and you cannot tell what the people outside the train are thinking or feeling. Some people think that religion is like a train - once we're in church we can shut out the world and be at peace with God. In a way that is true, all the great prophets of the Bible needed to find a quiet place to attend to God without distractions. Jesus himself often went off by himself to pray. Prayer for Jesus was a holiday, a holy day if you like, because Jesus needed to be alone with his Heavenly Father to refresh his spirit and to re-create his mind. In Mark's gospel, Jesus needed to leave the crowds behind, so he went with the disciples across the Sea of Galilee, and he was so tired that he went to sleep in the boat.

But the real world is always there, breaking into our lives like an aeroplane roaring over the church, interrupting our prayers. Jesus was not left to sleep in peace; the disciples woke him to hear the roaring of the storm. When they did reach the other side, there was a man with many unclean spirits tormenting him, so Jesus had to drive them into a herd of pigs nearby, and Jesus was forced to leave by the angry owners of the pigs.

Now he arrives on the shore again, in a different place, and immediately a great crowd gathered around him. Jesus' ministry was and is always in the real world among real people. This real world is God's creation, and we are God's beloved children, so of course Jesus was concerned with it.

Our first reading is a lament. David is weeping over the death of Saul and Jonathan. Even though they were sometimes enemies, Saul and David had a close relationship. Remember how David used to play the harp for Saul when he was depressed. And Jonathan and David were especially close friends. David says that their love was wonderful, passing the love of women.

This is the real world where God works; and Jesus came to show how God works in the world.

Our Gospel shows two examples, the dying daughter of Jairus and the woman suffering from haemorrhages.

At first sight they seem to be beyond help. The girl is dying, in fact she does die. Both she and the woman are unclean. The death and the blood set them apart, because the blood the woman was losing showed that she was losing her life and the death of the girl showed that she was separated from God for ever. The Israelites believed that the dead were in Sheol, down below, while God was in heaven, up above. They believed that somehow, touching blood or someone who was dead would involve them in the same loss of life and death.

Jesus, by curing the woman and raising the little girl from death shows that God is present even with those who die or who are dying. In fact, the power of Jesus will overcome death.

David wept for Saul and Jonathan, and rightly so, for he loved them both dearly, and he thought that when they died and they were separated from him by the grave, so the grave would separate them from God. No wonder he wept so bitterly.

And no wonder the mourners at the bedside of Jairus' daughter were making a commotion and weeping and wailing loudly.

But Jesus is confident. He sends the weepers and wailers away, takes the girl by the hand and tells her, "Little girl, get up!"

This story is told to us because we need to understand that for God's Son Jesus, pain and dying and death are no barriers to love. We cannot escape from the bad things of life, we can't take a holiday from illness, or get on a train to avoid a broken relationship. We cannot escape from this real and difficult world and enter the kingdom of God.

But we don't need to. Jesus shows us that the kingdom of God is right here with us and among us in this world that we live in, the world God has made. St Laurence, the deacon, worked in a kitchen and he said, "God walks among the pots and cooking pans." And whoever wrote the book of Lamentations declared, "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God's mercies never come to an end."

And this is true for us. Jesus Christ walks with us every step of the way and is in every moment of our lives. We do need to take holidays, we do need to come to church to pray, we do need to read the scriptures quietly to ourselves. We are not trying to escape from the world we live in, we are not trying to find the Kingdom of God, we are not trying to reach up to heaven to find God. What we are doing is reminding ourselves that God is with us always in every part of our lives, we are reminding ourselves that the Kingdom of God is right here in our hearts and in our world, and that heaven and earth are brought together in Christ.

The woman suffering from haemorrhages knew this, and Jairus knew this. Both of them trusted that God, through Jesus, would bring them out of their trouble, and God, we know, is always to be trusted.