On Jordan's stormy banks I stand and cast a wishful eye

To Canaan's fair and happy land where my possessions lie

I am bound for the promised land I am bound for the promised land

Oh, who will come and go with me? I am bound for the promised land

If there's anything we all have in common, it's we enter a new millennium.

It's probably our diversity. We come from many ethnic backgrounds and cultural backgrounds.

We rush through an amazing variety of appointments and destinations our grandparents could have only imagined.

There's even a work vocabulary that most of us have that we don't even share with our family and friends.

Psychiatrists tell us that a sense of alienation and separation is the common malady of our day.

Perhaps that's why we all feel so healed when we gather around a piano or a guitar and begin singing in harmony

the songs of where we've come from and where we're going.

It gives us hope to know that although the parts we sing are different, all our various voices create a beautiful chord.

Not long ago a friend asked me, do you still sing harmony in your church?

When I said, yes, we do, he said, I miss that. We sing unison mostly.

The choir, the organ, they play a discant that are unfamiliar, but I really miss the harmony.

Perhaps the reason harmony pulls at our hearts is that it pulls us inside from the cold alienation of our separate worlds

into the embrace of a family that is joined not by being alike, but by being in love.

Harmony reminds us that it's not consensus, but commitment that holds us together.

A commitment to a father who has charted the course from history to eternity and holds even the modern diversity in the palm of his hand.

So come, you sing your part, I'll sing my part, but we'll all sing the song of the redeemed.