This year there are 22 Sundays after Trinity taking us up to the end of October, so covering almost half the church's year. Everything really exciting - Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost - has already happened, in the year’s first half.

So is that why the second half of the church’s year is referred to as 'Ordinary Time'? In fact not. Rather the phase ‘Ordinary Time’ comes from the way in which the Sundays are counted - with Ordinal numbers: first, second, third, etc after Trinity.

But in another way these Sundays are very ordinary. We meet the Jesus of the every day, the Jesus of farmers and fisherman, who told stories of lost sheep, a man beaten up by the roadside, a ponsy landowner, fishers of men, treasure buried in a field, seed sown by the wayside, or, as in today's gospel, the kingdom of God is compared to the sprouting and growth of a new seed – an every day world that became a canvas for the Holy Spirit. Here was God, not in far off Jerusalem, but walking every day through the fields, and along the shores, of Galilee.