Please read this passage before reading this homily.
“We set sail from Troas.” Troas is the dividing line between the continents of Asia and Europe. It is the meeting place of the largest continent with the second smallest (the smallest is Oceania-Australia). The good news has reached Europe!
The first converts in Europe seem to be women of Philippi, including Lydia an entrepreneur in purple cloth.
Most of Paul’s epistles were sent to churches in Europe. Rome, Corinth, Thessalonica, Philippi are European places. The Apostles were non-European people who came and evangelized Europeans. Our culture is of European vintage. We owe our faith to the work of non-Europeans. People of Asia and North Africa are our grandparents in the faith.
Descendants of the early Church in the Holy Land still live in the Holy Land. They are Orthodox Christians and Catholic Christians. In the world of today they are usually called Palestinians along with their Muslim neighbors. In the bitter world of politics and war, they are fighting with Jewish brothers and sisters, the people who had preserved and passed on to them the Sacred Scriptures that the Lord Jesus Christ learned as a child. While it is hard to judge responsibility in the fighting that has ensnared both Jew and Gentile, Israeli and Palestinian, it is certain that all the people in the Holy Land, who all claim descent from Abraham, need the support of our prayers and our working for social justice and peace.