journey — Andy James

An Unexpected Journey

May 1, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Acts 16:9-15
preached on May 1, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Whenever I’m in an airport, I dream about the other places I might go if I could only just get on a flight at another gate. My ticket usually has some sort of average destination—most recently they’ve been places like Louisville, Nashville, or Jackson—but all too often I manage to end up one or two gates over from a flight to more glamorous spot or a place where I have good friends whom I haven’t seen in far too long. These dreams of alternative exciting destinations are almost impossible to fulfill, particularly by air, as I almost always must carefully plan my itinerary and destination, and I cannot even begin to imagine the additional cost of making such a chance on a whim!

It gets a little easier when traveling by car or on foot to make an unexpected extra stop at someplace that just looks interesting. For years and years, the trip between New York and Florida was well-marked by endless billboards that culminated in a giant sombrero at South of the Border, a roadside attraction in the midst of the swamplands of the Pee Dee River just south of the North Carolina border featuring gas stations, restaurants, an amusement park, a motel, and multiple stores that sell nearly everything you could ever imagine emblazoned with the “South of the Border” name and logo. I can’t imagine very many people who would put such a place on their formal itinerary, particularly one that is so very campy and even borderline offensive in its portrayal of Latino people and culture, but it is certainly a spot that is odd enough that it is difficult not to stop once! But even in this exceedingly mobile age, I suspect that most of us don’t have the luxury of stepping away from our carefully-planned itineraries to explore many new possibilities along the way.

Our reading this morning from Acts puts us in the midst of an unexpected journey that opened Paul and his companions to so many new things along the way. Paul had been making his way around modern-day Turkey with the goal of proclaiming the gospel there, but his attempts were thwarted at every turn, not by any human authority but because they had “been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” Forced to go in a different direction by “the Spirit of Jesus,” he and his party ended up at Troas, a port city on the Aegean Sea.

As they tried to sort out where to go next, Paul had a vision during the night. He saw a man of Macedonia,the Roman province of mainland Europe across the Aegean from Troas, standing there, and this man was pleading with Paul: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” Trusting that this vision carried the wisdom and call of God, Paul and his party quickly turned from their intended destination of Asia Minor to the new possibilities across the Aegean Sea in Europe—a similar journey seen by so many refugees not so far from Troas who too seek a different path of life from Turkey across the Aegean to the island of Lesbos on Greek territory in Europe. Paul and his companions made several brief stops on their unexpected journey to Macedonia, but they ended up staying “for some days” in the city of Philippi as Paul’s missionary journeys turned to Europe for the first time as part of this unexpected journey.

As was his custom, in Philippi Paul first sought out faithful Jews who might be particularly receptive to his message about Jesus. So on the Sabbath, he and his party went to a place near a river outside the city gate where they expected people might be gathering for prayer, and they found a group of women gathered there who welcomed conversation with them.

One woman named Lydia was particularly interested in what Paul and his companions were sharing. She was “a worshiper of God,” likely not a Jew, perhaps intrigued by what she had heard before about God but perhaps not particularly interested in going through the process of becoming Jewish herself. She was a woman of substantial position in that time and place, a dealer in purple cloth who had made her way to Philippi from Asia Minor. As a businesswoman and merchant, Lydia had surely overcome great odds to build the networks she needed to do her work and run her own household—an unusual and incredible feat for a woman in that day and age!

Lydia’s interest in Paul’s message about Jesus quickly turned to deep engagement. She and her household were baptized, and then she invited Paul and his companions to stay in her home, extending incredible hospitality to these new companions on her journey of faithfulness and life. Paul and his party enjoyed Lydia’s support and presence throughout their stay in Philippi, even as Paul and Silas found themselves imprisoned there and were then freed from jail in one of the most memorable stories of the entire book of Acts. Lydia is remembered even now for her role in establishing this early church, and Paul remembered his days in Philippi with great fondness throughout his ministry, culminating in his most jubilant letter to them in the book of Philippians.

Paul’s trip to Philippi and encounter with Lydia are the sorts of stories that make it clear how meaningful unexpected journeys can be to us. We may not find stores filled with strange kitsch in the middle of a swamp like at South of the Border, the clarity of a vision to guide us along the way as Paul experienced in Troas, the wonderful possibility of a new continent and broader destination for our work as they found in Macedonia, or the gift of generous hospitality from those we meet along the way as Paul experienced with Lydia. But the unexpected—and maybe even expected—journeys of our lives can nonetheless be times of transformation and hope as we welcome the wonder of the Holy Spirit into our midst.

We need look no further than Paul’s journey to Macedonia and Philippi to give us a few ideas about how to be open to these possibilities in our lives. First, good conversation can open our lives to the new things of the Spirit. Just as Paul and his friends gathered with the group of women “outside the gate by the river” in Philippi, so we can sit with those we know and love—and those we would like to know and love more—to share good conversation and listen for God’s voice together. When we can’t get a direct word from God in the gift of a nighttime vision or a voice from the cloud, I have found that one of the clearest ways to hear the Spirit speaking is in conversation with one another, whether it be with a good friend over a simple meal, with a group of the committed faithful who struggle together with the implications of scripture or the experiences of common life, or even with a passing acquaintance who offers the presence of God at a time when we least expected it.

We can also experience God’s transformation and hope in the gift of shared service and faith with one another. Paul and Lydia connected in amazing and unexpected ways across boundaries of gender, culture, wealth, and place, and yet God spoke in and through their relationship to guide their lives of faith together. When we experience the gift of time together in faith and service, we are united to one another and to God in new ways that open us for deeper possibilities in the future. I am still inspired for my own service by the connections and possibilities that I experienced almost ten years ago as several of us from Whitestone joined a group of twenty Presbyterians from New York City in mission and recovery work on the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. While I had met some of those on the trip before we traveled together, the work and experiences that we shared united us with one another and God in new ways that still inspire me nearly ten years later.

Finally, our unexpected journeys take their most powerful turn in the wonder and possibility of hospitality. In welcoming Paul and his party to her home, Lydia offered a powerful witness to the wonder of the gospel to break down barriers and bring people together. In the same way, when we offer God’s welcome to people in our life together in our homes, in our church, and beyond, we open ourselves to the gift of God’s presence in those in whom we might least expect it. And when we gather at the Lord’s table the welcome we have known from God with one another, we are lifted up into the presence of Christ himself, and we experience the power of hospitality as we share it with others and find it so broadly shared with us.

So may God open us to unexpected journeys, to places, times and ways that we will encounter the presence of the Holy Spirit in ways we would have never imagined, so that we might join God in the work of proclaiming the gospel of love and life in Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Strange and Wonderful Meal

April 3, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 24:13-35
preached on April 3, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone
There are a multitude of ways to spend time with people you enjoy. You might go to dinner and a movie—in a theater or in someone’s home. If you happen to live in New York City and have the budget for it, you might go see a Broadway show, a ballet, an opera, or some other cultural event. You might get together at someone’s house for a meal, some conversation, and maybe a game of some sort. And depending on your interests, you might go to a sporting event of some sort or wander around a museum together.

My two favorite options, though, are a little different. For me, there’s nothing quite like taking a walk or sharing a meal. The conversation that comes even in quiet as you wander the streets or parks of our city connects us with one another. Conversation flows, ideas are exchanged, and something special happens as we spend time together. Then, in those times when we sit at table together, we find a strange presence in our midst, as walls of division are broken down and the connection among those present deepens all the more.

Rembrandt?, The Walk to Emmaus

Maybe my appreciation of shared walks and meals with friends is rooted in our resurrection story from Luke this morning. The story of Easter morning that we heard last Sunday offers us a clear proclamation of the resurrection, but we never actually see Jesus alive again. The only evidence of the resurrection is an empty tomb, and that could be caused by so many things other than resurrection. So with the proof of this strange event limited to a missing body, Jesus’ disciples start to move on with their lives, scattering from Jerusalem in disbelief as they start to figure out what they will do without their beloved teacher and friend.

Two of them then set out on the road to the village Emmaus, a seven-mile journey from Jerusalem, easily reachable on foot in a somewhat leisurely afternoon journey. The conversation naturally turned to everything that they had experienced together over the last week—the triumphant arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem as the people cried out “Hosanna,” the challenging teachings that Jesus had offered in the temple, the Passover meal that they had shared, the arrest and trial of their friend, the chants of the crowd to “crucify him,” the sentence of death urged on by religious leaders and proclaimed by the Roman governor, the strange events at Golgotha as Jesus was crucified, the placement of his body in a simple, new tomb, and now the reports that his body had gone missing so quickly.

As they walked and talked, another man joined them on the road, joining in their surely animated conversation, asking them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” His question stopped them in their tracks as it all soaked in. Their journey with Jesus had begun somewhat unexpectedly as they stepped away from their families and homes and livelihoods because there was something compelling about his message. They had taken him seriously when he invited them—maybe even insisted to them—to set everything aside and follow him. Their worlds had been turned upside down by this journey, this message, this man. And now, after an eventful week, they found their world turned upside down once again because he was no longer with them. So this strange man’s question came as a real surprise. He forced them to take stock of their emotions and lives for the first time in light of everything that had happened—and they quite literally stopped in their tracks.

As they began to answer this stranger’s question and walk along together again, the disciples told this stranger about their friend Jesus, about their hopes for him, about the death that he had experienced, and about the empty tomb that the women had found that very morning. Even though the stranger said he had not heard anything about what had happened to Jesus, he soon began to explain everything that they had told him about, interpreting everything that had happened in light of the scriptures that they all knew so very well. The conversation flowed, and the disciples came to a deeper understanding of everything that they had experienced.

He Qi, The Road to Emmaus

When the afternoon came to an end and the disciples reached their destination in Emmaus, the stranger “walked ahead as if he were going on.” But they were insistent:

Stay with us,
because it is almost evening
and the day is now nearly over.

Convinced by the logic of their argument and the lengthening shadows all around them, the stranger joined the disciples for the night. When they sat down at the table to share the evening meal, though, everything shifted once again. The guest became the host, blessing and breaking the bread, inviting them to share in a feast beyond their knowing. Suddenly the disciples recognized that the stranger who had been with them all afternoon was none other than the risen and living Jesus himself!

Just as quickly as they had recognized him, he vanished from their sight. They began to wonder and question and ask,“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” They immediately set out for Jerusalem again, ignoring their own advice to the stranger that it was too late to be traveling—their joy was too great, and they had to share this news with the other disciples! When they arrived there, they learned that Peter had also seen Jesus alive again, and “they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

This incredible, life-changing, world-shattering walk and meal marked a dramatic shift for the disciples as they went from skeptics to witnesses of the resurrection in the time it took for an afternoon walk and an evening meal. We can join in this walk, this meal, and this transformation for ourselves as we make our way through these Easter days.

Fritz von Uhde, Road to Emmaus

First, we are invited to join the disciples in sharing the stories of our walks with Jesus in the journeys of our lives. We can bear witness to the ways that we have been changed by our encounters with the story of Jesus’ life and ministry as we walk with others along the way. We can talk with one another about how the experiences of Christ in our world have changed us and opened us to new and different ways of seeing and living in the world. And we can explore how the stories of Jesus’ life and ministry connect us with one another and with Christ as we walk this way together.

Then, we can gather at table for this meal as we look for the presence of Christ in our midst. We can open the doors to this feast wide so that all may know the kind of welcome that God offers here. We can come here expecting that Christ will meet us and be made known to us in the breaking of the bread, just as he was to the disciples on that first Easter evening. And we can trust that the feast we share here opens us to a great feast yet to come, to the feast on God’s holy mountain, “a feast of rich food, a feast of well- aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well- aged wines strained clear.”

These journeys and these meals are then the openings for us of the deeper, broader, wider transformation of the world. Just like the disciples, our worlds are turned upside down by the journeys and the meals that show us the resurrection. We cannot meet the risen Christ along the road or at the table and be the same. We cannot claim the resurrection as our own and live as if Jesus’ death matters more than his new life. We cannot claim a meal of new life here at this table and live as if nothing has changed. And we cannot go forth into the world to hear and see and witness the resurrection for ourselves if all that we are looking for is life beyond death for ourselves.

So as we make our way to this strange and wonderful meal today, as we journey forth into the world to walk with one another and quite likely with Jesus himself, may we know the presence of the risen Christ among us so that we can be a part of his work of transformation in our world and as all things are being made new.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.

The Stories That Define Us: Abraham

March 16, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 12:1-9 and Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
preached on March 16, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s an old song I learned back in Sunday school:

Father Abraham had many sons,
many sons had Father Abraham.
I am one of them, and so are you,
so let’s just praise the Lord.

Now we are clearly not all “sons” of Abraham—some of us are daughters of Abraham, after all!—but this simple song reminds us that Abraham is one of the most important characters in the Old Testament. His story is an important part of our story. His story defines us, too.

Abraham started out as the man named Abram in our reading from Genesis this morning. Abram seemed to be a pretty average older fellow, seventy-five years old, who had no children or grandchildren. For some unknown reason, God reached out to Abram at his advanced age and made him quite an offer:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

There’s no clear reason for why God chose Abram. He wasn’t exactly in the prime of life to make a long journey, let alone father a great nation. His family at that point consisted of a wife who was unable to bear children, a nephew who seemed to stand at the center of controversy wherever he went, and the women and men who were his property. And Abram was pretty well settled in his home and life at that point, with extensive possessions and people around him, so there was no reason for him to go anywhere. All in all, Abram wouldn’t have been my first choice to receive the great fullness of God’s blessing, so it’s almost as if several others had been approached and turned it all down! Yet for whatever reason, God chose Abram to receive this promise of something new.

But nearly as important as God’s choice in all this was Abram’s response. After God gave him this command, Abram picked up his possessions, his small family, his slaves, and his animals, and set out on this journey. It was a pretty crazy move. Nowadays, people think very little of moving across the country, away from family and friends, but even one hundred years ago, a journey of 400 miles as Abram made would have been very difficult. First off, long-distance travel was not easy. The roads were focused on commerce, so a family on the move would have been very much out of place and would have faced some real danger along the road. But once they got “to the place that [God showed them],” it didn’t get any easier. The place wasn’t empty— “the Canaanites were in the land,” and Abram and his family couldn’t just buy it up with the proceeds from the land they had left. But Abram didn’t turn back—he built an altar to the Lord there at his first stop, then traveled on further, pitched his tent, and built another altar to the Lord as he “journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.”

That of course is not the end of Abram’s story. God continues to work in his life to keep changing things for him. His journeys take him a little further, into Egypt, before he finally settles back in Canaan. He receives a new name, Abraham, that indicates how God’s promises are taking hold in his life. And he and his beloved wife finally bear a son in their old age who is the firstborn of the promised great nation. In the end, Abraham’s journey covers hundreds of miles and many, many years, but it ultimately reflects the deep and wide promises that God offered to him and that carry through the centuries of Judaism and Christianity.

Abraham’s story matters for us in a wide variety of ways. Now there are certainly some elements of it that are more problematic, such as the promise of land in Genesis 14 that continues to inflame relations between Israelis and Palestinians today, the truly shameful way in which Abram tossed out his slave Hagar and their son Ishmael, and the disturbing tale of how Abraham followed God’s instructions so carefully and so far that very nearly he offered his beloved son as a human sacrifice to God. But the broader story of God’s promise to Abraham and Abraham’s subsequent response is one of the great defining stories of faith for us even today. It gives us three particular gifts for our own day and age, for our own walk of faith in this world.

First, God’s promise to Abraham shows us how God’s transformation can take hold in our world. Things do not have to remain as they are now, even if we don’t quite know how they will change or where we are going. We like Abraham can listen for God’s call and journey forth into a new and different way of life. We can encounter something deeper and greater than what we have known before. We can stop being defined by what has come before and instead trust that God will unfold a new future for us.

That new future holds the second great gift of Abraham for our lives of faith today, the gift of the journey. On this journey of Lent, I’ve been paying particular attention to the daily devotional that we’ve been sharing, Too Deep for Words. This past Tuesday, it offered a beautiful reflection on the gift of Abraham’s journey. First it lifted up the simple prayer of modern monk and mystic Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself…. I hope that I will never do anything apart from [my] desire [to please you]. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. (Thoughts in Solitude)

Then the writer for the day looked further at this how this journey affects us:

However the Spirit spoke to Abraham, he followed the voice on an unlikely journey to a place he’d never seen, trusting God’s promise that blessing would come if he’d only follow. I doubt he saw many cairns, trail markers, as he trudged along looking for his new home, but his life is a cairn for us, showing us the right way, the way of faith. He did not know what each day would bring or where he was going. He simply put one foot ahead of the other, trusting that God was guiding him and would fulfill the promise, even on days it didn’t seem likely. (David L. Miller, Too Deep for Words: Reflections for Lent 2014, p. 17)

So Abraham gifts us with the possibility of a journey in our own lives, following God into unknown places, trusting a new and different way, looking for signs and markers of God’s presence, and filled with confidence that we are not the first to journey this new way.

But strangely and wonderfully, we are more than just people of promise and journey. Abraham’s third gift to us is family. We are people defined so well by that strange little song about Father Abraham, united by this common parent, linked with one another and all the families of the earth as we live out God’s blessing. Again, our Lenten devotional put it so beautifully:

Centuries separate us from Abraham, but we are all his children. Our situation is the same. We go our way trusting the great heart who launched us on life’s journey, joined with others who help us keep the faith when we waver. (David L. Miller, Too Deep for Words: Reflections for Lent 2014, p. 19)

All of these gifts are signified so well in today’s service as we ordain and install our ruling elders and deacons. In this strange and wonderful moment, we watch as God’s promises take hold in our midst as new leaders step forward and are set apart. Like Abraham, we trust that God’s call in our lives is enough to carry us through to places that we have not yet seen. And in this strange act of the laying on of hands, we are bound together with Abraham and so many other saints to know God’s continuing presence as we go forth on this journey of service and life together.

It is a gift and a challenge to walk in these ways, the gift of God’s grace and the challenge of God’s love to go forth into something new, but we can trust always that we will not journey this way alone, that Abraham and so many others have gone this way before us and that God will go with us just as God has gone with them. So may we trust the gift and challenge of God’s grace and mercy to be like Abraham, to trust that God’s promises for us are real, to step out and journey into that something new, and to remember that there are always companions with us on that journey. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Path to the Holy Mountain I: The Holy Mountain

December 1, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 122 and Isaiah 2:1-5
preached on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As many of you have figured out by now, I love Advent. This brief four-week season that starts out the church year and bridges that gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas is my favorite time of the church year. Some of that is because I think we too often forget about the importance of preparation in our world. I believe that it is essential to pause and get ready for the major milestones in our lives, to spend time intentionally getting our house in order so that the coming celebration can mean all the more.

But this year, I think there is something different in my thinking about Advent and Christmas. This year, it doesn’t seem like there is the same sort of preparation before us. I don’t see the kinds of substantial and uncertain change ahead in our church or our world that help make Advent more meaningful to me. The anxiety of this year’s Christmas season seems to be much more focused on the immediate stress of these busy days and not on something else. There is still plenty of war and strife and poverty and injustice in our world, but it seems to be touching us less and less, and so our longings for something new seem to be less dramatic and immediate than they have been.

And yet this season of preparation for radical change, this time called Advent, is still before us. It calls out that there is something new ahead. It insists that our preparations for Christmas be more than simply buying the perfect presents, setting out the perfect decorations, and getting all the other festivities of the season in exact order. It reminds us that Christmas is not a simple and sweet holiday about the birth of a baby but rather a radical intervention by God that changes everything.

This year, in preparing for this season, our readings from the prophet Isaiah stuck out to me. Isaiah has the wonderful ability to speak so meaningfully to so many different contexts. First it speaks to the prophet’s own time, when he was encouraging the people to amend their ways and return to the Lord after they had taken up different paths focused on their own prosperity and righteousness. Then it speaks again in the days of the assembly and editing of the Hebrew Bible, what we often refer to as the Old Testament, when these words offered great comfort and challenge to a people who were struggling to reestablish their relationship with God and one another without the independence that had defined their identity. Isaiah speaks again to a later day and age, the time when Jesus emerged, when these words gave these hearers hope of a Messiah who would make everything different once and for all. And even now, today, these words point us forward to a future time when God’s presence will be all the more real and complete, when all things will be made new and all creation will walk in the light of the Lord each and every day.

Our readings this morning from Isaiah and the Psalms point us to this kind of journey of walking in the light of the Lord and show us a bit of the destination that is before us. The goal of this journey, you see, is certainly a new and deeper celebration of Christmas, but it is also something more, something that is more deeply transformative of us and our world than just another baby being born, something that gives us a glimpse of God’s new thing that was begun but not finished in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus. These readings point us to the holy mountain of God, to the sacred and holy place that stands at the center of all creation, to the great temple that stands as the highest of mountains, above all the hills. This holy mountain is the abiding place of God, the place where we know the fullness of God’s presence in our lives and our world, the place where instruction and wisdom flow forth each and every day, the place where swords are beat into plowshares, spears turned into pruning hooks, and the knowledge of war becomes the practice of peace. This year, as much as ever, I believe that the path from Advent to Christmas demands that make our way to the holy mountain of God.

But this vision from Isaiah only gives us a partial image of what we should expect to see at the end of this journey. We don’t have the same expectations and understanding of the temple that were prominent in Isaiah’s own time. The holy mountain of God that we need and expect for our own time is quite likely very different from what our parents and grandparents expected. And this holy mountain where we will know the transformation of our world is only now coming into view.

It’s quite like an incredible view of the city that I experienced on one of my several flights in recent weeks. It was a cloudy and foggy night, with low clouds hanging over almost all of the city—except for a small part of lower Manhattan and Battery Park City that was crystal clear all the way down to ground level and of course the spire of the Empire State Building, peeking its tip through the clouds. It was an eerie sight, with very familiar elements that were yet very different from the view that I know quite well. There was so much that was so familiar—and so much more that was still shrouded from view. This is what is before us as we approach the holy mountain of God this Advent—a glorious yet uncertain and incomplete view of something new, an astounding sight of God’s wonder and grace that is yet beyond our understanding until its full unveiling in the days to come.

Even though we don’t know the fullness of this new thing, exactly what this holy mountain will look like, or even when we might get there, we can still prepare ourselves to enter this holy place. Ultimately as much as Advent is about getting ourselves ready for Christmas, it is also about getting ready for this bigger thing, too, for the day that is to come when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills.” These preparations involve an honest look at our lives and our world, a careful assessment of the things that distract us from the journey to God’s holy mountain, and a hopeful view of the things ahead that will help open our eyes for a glimpse of God’s new thing that is ahead. And just like that strange night view of the city, we will likely have glimpses all the way to the surface of this new thing, too—little spots where peace suddenly prevails over the ways of war, brief moments when we begin to understand what God is up to in our lives and figure out how to join in, surprising opportunities to do something new and take a couple steps forward on the path to the holy mountain.

There is no better place to take our first steps on this journey, then, than at this table. This feast is the closest thing we can know in the here and now to God’s holy mountain, for this table sits at the intersection of heaven and earth. It brings together the meal shared by Jesus and his disciples before his death and after his resurrection with the glorious feast that we will share with him and all the faithful on God’s holy mountain. We are right in the middle, right here and right now, ready to experience this foretaste of something new, to welcome this strange feast that will give us sustenance for the journey.

So as we set out on this journey for God’s holy mountain, may you spend your days reflecting on what this strange and wonderful holy place might be in your life and in our world, and may the feast we share today sustain us along the way until we join with the faithful of all nations, of every time and place, to walk in the light of the Lord each and every day. Lord, come quickly! Amen.