December 24, Christmas Eve: The Prince of Peace

Good evening, and welcome to the 362nd Christmas of our congregation. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or something else, no matter what your belief or unbelief, whether you worship Christ or admire him, we are glad that you came here tonight.

Let me acknowledge the musicians and singers and readers for tonight. I welcome my colleague Cantor Josh Breitzer from Congregation Beth Elohim who will read the second lesson and sing the Akeda. It is a precious gift. Michael Daves, I thank you, and your guest singers with you. I thank especially our music director Aleeza Meir, our kapellmeisterin, who makes this service happen. You may not applaud them during the service, but you may applaud them now.

 The candles are all alight. Later in the service it will get dark. I’m instructing you not to turn on your cell-phone lights. Please just enjoy the candlelight. If you can’t make out all the lyrics in the bulletin, then just sing what you can from memory. Most of the words will come to you. So would you kindly turn off all your mobile devices right now and keep them off?

I love the traditions and the hymns of the holidays, but if they provide you your only knowledge of Christian doctrine, then it might surprise you that the New Testament never appeals to the Virgin Birth of Jesus to establish his divinity; it rather derives his divinity from his Resurrection. The mystery of the Virgin Birth is certainly told by the Gospels, but its immediate import, if anything, is a negative comment about men, and the sexual rights of men, of which I will not say more right now!

So what this feast of the Incarnation celebrates is the opposite of the exaltation of a man to godhood. Rather, we marvel at God’s voluntary humiliation, the great made small, the high made low, the glorious made humble, the almighty choosing to be powerless. You know, “What if God was one of us, just a stranger on the bus.” The omnipotent creator of the universe now fully at the mercy of the MTA. It’s as if God had to surrender all of God’s divine right and privilege, and be absolutely weak and poor and small, just to earn the right to be God again at Easter.

That God should behave like this is not new with Christians. We got it from Israel. It’s already in the Torah. When God first identified with Abram, who was Abram? Nobody. Not a prince nor a priest, not a doctor, not a lawyer, a nobody. When God identified with the twelve tribes of Jacob, who were they? A rabble of slaves descended from a despicable band of brothers who were boorish brigands among the civilized Canaanites. When God identified with Israel and Judah, what were they but two scrabbling minor principalities, critiqued by their own prophets, both of them ending in total failure. God said, “I’m with them! Here I am!” And the other gods and goddesses said, “What kind of a self-loathing, self-hating god are you?”

Why does God behave this way? For love, for love’s sake, God is mad with love, as mad as Don Quixote. This lavish love of God is taught by the Torah and the Prophets. And then we Christians take it a further step, that God identifies with us so far as literally to become one of us, and one of us in poverty, weakness, and dishonor. Again for love, but for something else as well. For peace.

By doing this God demonstrates that God is for peace, full stop. The angels said so to the shepherds. For in such a humble and vulnerable status, what other recourse do you have? So it’s not just that God stands for peace, but God lies down for peace.

We have been troubled by the rise in violence around us. The congregation heard me preach on violence the last four weeks. Yesterday we heard of a new arms race of nuclear weapons. We’ve felt the increase in aggression as the necessary means to make us great again. This is just another version of one historic vision for humanity, the vision shared by empire after empire since ancient times, the brutal vision of how to be strong and great and powerful. It makes some sense; Plato and Aristotle agreed with it, and it goes with nature: kill or be killed, if you’re not on top you’re on the bottom. And if we have gods we contrive our gods to back this up. Christians too often do this too.

Tonight the story reminds us that the God of the gospels does not back this up, that this God as a baby is on the bottom, and as a young man gets killed, for in the life of Jesus, God lies down for peace. This presents the other vision of humanity, which is so unnatural that it takes a miracle. The Incarnation should remind us every year what the God of the Prophets and the Gospels really is for, that God is for peace, full stop.

This is the reason behind the communion of the saints, that God does not build walls. This is the reason for the forgiveness of sins, that God does not stand upon his rights. This is the reason for the resurrection of the body, that God wants healing over judgment, and this is the reason for the life everlasting, the God offers unconditioned hospitality. This is why God’s light shines in the darkness that we weave around ourselves, to find us in our fear and misery of our own making.

The lessons that follow tonight will tell you where to look for God and what kind of God to look for. They tell you what God stands for. You will hear Cantor Breitzer chant the blessing of Abraham, whose hand was stayed from violence. You will hear the vision of Isaiah, of the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. 

That’s why you came here tonight, for the light that shines in the darkness, to see the other vision once again, to be reminded of the hope, to be quickened by the music, and to confirm it when you sing. This is the kind of thing you want to believe, the challenge you accept, this is the kind of life you want to live, that’s why you are here. You did right to come here tonight. God bless you one and all.

Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Meeter, All Rights Reserved.

December 18, Advent 4, Violence #4: Jesus

Isaiah 7:10-18, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25

Let me repeat what the angel said to Joseph in his dream: “Joseph, son of David, fear not to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” So that’s what Jesus is supposed to do–save us from our sins. Is one of those sins violence? Can Jesus save us from the sin of violence?

The general witness of the Bible is that the problem of violence will not finally be solved by us. In some things we may make real progress, but the evolution of humanity is also the evolution of destruction, devastation, deprivation, and depravity. The creation of deserts, the multiplications of Mordors on the landscape for the fossil fuels–violence on the earth.

Now this doesn’t matter, if you believe, as many Christians do, that Jesus saves our souls to free us from this sorry world and send us to eternity in heaven, and we will abandon the earth forever. If this world is just a testing ground for ultimate heaven or hell, then violence is a condition to be escaped and not a problem to be solved, and there is no point in being anti-violent.

But if you believe that “God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved,” if you believe that the Lord Jesus was born into the world to save us in the world, and that he saves us for what he told us to pray for: “thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven,” then the problem of violence must eventually be solved. Which takes more faith than believing that we just escape to heaven, because the solution seems no closer than it ever was. Faith wears out.

No wonder faith is regarded by St. Paul as a kind of obedience. He speaks in our Epistle of “the obedience of faith.” This means that faith is not so much what we favor God with upon our evaluating God to be worthy of our faith, it’s rather that faith is an obligation that we owe to God just by our being human beings, when we recognize our place in the world and acknowledge our condition.

You have faith in God to save you from your sins. You trust God to answer your prayer that God will purify your conscience by God’s daily visitation. You trust that God frees you from the guilt of your sin and liberates you from the power of your sin. This is the offer of the gospel that bears repeating and explaining, but today let me assume it, with regard to the specific sin of violence.

In the first sermon I said that violence is natural and of necessity, and that all nations are violent, even the best of them. I said that following Jesus means choosing against violence. We can choose against what’s natural and of necessity because Jesus calls us to freedom. Not yet in this life freedom from violence, but freedom within it. Freedom from the guilt of our inevitable complicity, and freedom to witness against the violence that includes us. Jesus saves you from your sin of violence by freeing you from the guilt of your participation in it, and liberating you from its dominion so that you can bear witness against it in the great courtroom trial that is the history of the world.

In the second sermon I said that we witness against it in two ways: unmasking and advocating. We unmask the pretensions of violence, that it does not make us great, and as a solution it’s a delusion because if it solves one problem it only makes for more, even if in extremity we have no recourse but to participate in it. Our second witnessing is to advocate for the meek of the earth, using our reputations as good citizens to speak up for the unacknowledged victims of violence, especially when that violence is subtle and institutional and tolerated as a cost of business by otherwise good governments and respectable corporations. We do this despite being regarded as quixotic and naive.

In the third sermon I said that being the witness is not to be jury or the judge, and we have no control of the verdict, which we have to leave to God. But then if the bad guys keep getting away with it, or even the mostly good guys who do not see their complicity in violence keep denying it, we will be tempted by our grievances to bitterness. I said that in order to practice anti-violence we have to cultivate the disciplines of penitence and joy.

All this is what I mean by Jesus saving you from the sin of violence. Not sparing you from its existence but saving you from your guilt in it and liberating you for witness within it. But now I have to say something more. I want to speak to the emotional side of it. I want to speak to the ominous feeling of the violence that threatens us even if we want to live by faith. What about the fear of it?

For this I want to step back and take a look at Joseph in our gospel story, and the choices that he had to make. His choices were not easy. Should he act upon his dream? Should he even believe his dream? If he ignores his dream and keeps to his plan to dismiss Mary quietly, he will save his righteous reputation.

But if he believes his dream and takes her as his wife he takes on her disgrace. He’ll be assumed to have slept with her ahead of time and thus regarded not only as unrighteous but a hypocrite. Or, worse, maybe his fiancé has slept with someone else, and then he’s a cuckold and a fool, or at best, he’ll be regarded as quixotic and naive, just as I said you will be if you choose anti-violence.

It will cost a lot for Joseph to act upon his dream, and he’ll to practice the obedience of faith, for him a new kind of righteousness. I have heard it said by atheists that faith is a refuge for weaklings. Not for Joseph in this case, and not for practitioners of anti-violence.

The obedience of faith calls us into that which we fear. In the dream the angel said, “Joseph, fear not to take Mary as your wife.” The angel has to say it because Joseph will certainly fear.

You know how shaken you feel when you wake up from a powerful dream, even when it’s not a nightmare. I can imagine the poor guy sitting on his bed in the dark before the dawn, the dream all in his head, and he is facing all these new unknowns, so much in his life outside of his control, that he must take and name and raise a child who belongs to God, with a destiny beyond him for which he was now responsible. “Joseph, son of David, fear not!” Oh my God. Every Advent I regain my admiration for this quiet man.

I have been preaching this series on violence in part because I am afraid. I can feel it in my body. I am not the only one. We fear for our nation. We fear the top-down celebration of violence and its increased cultivation. We fear the anger of our longtime victims, and their bitterness. We fear the other nations posturing for war. We fear our violence against our planet and the weather responding in kind. If courage is not the absence of fear but making the awful choice between your fears, then what should you fear most? The violent environment in which you live or the call of the gospel upon your conscience? If we do the right thing, can Jesus save us from our fear? Not completely, the bad guys will always be out there, without consciences or scruples, and gaining power.

I can’t solve the problem, apart from the obedience of faith. I don’t have an antidote to fear, except for this: There’s something in the way our souls are made that we can be quickened by a sign, even in the midst of fearful chaos and disorder. The sign for Joseph was the vision of a mother pregnant with her child. The same sign was offered by Isaiah to King Ahaz when Jerusalem was under siege, surrounded by armies ready to kill them. The sign is the mother with the infant child, even in the midst of all the violence.

This shall be a sign to you. Such vulnerability. Such weakness in military terms, but in biological terms such power, more real power in the body of the mother than in the pretensions of the guys in charge. The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name, God with us. God saves the world from the soft inside and not from the top, and you must receive God in God’s chosen vulnerability.

I cannot solve the problem of violence but I offer you the sign, and that you read in the sign that God does not abandon you, and that God’s presence with you is small and soft and fragile but with the power of life. I cannot prove it for you, I can only invite you to believe it, and even more I invite you to love it, because love is stronger than death, and your love will be stronger than your fear.

Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

December 11, Advent 3, Violence #3: Vengeance

Isaiah 35:1-10, Magnificat, James 5:7-10, Matthew 11:2-11

When I was a kid my parents did not allow us to have toy guns. So we just used the best sticks we could find. For my tenth birthday I was given some money and I bought myself a toy machine gun. It had a crank that when you turned it, it went rata-tata-tata. My parents gave in and let me keep it.

Violence, as I’ve been saying for the last three weeks, is natural, and today I’m adding that violence is attractive and alluring, even to children. Cartoons and comics and video games are full of it. And judging by so much of adult television and cinema I’m going to say that violence is seductive and even beautiful.

If beauty be defined as “that which draws your eye to look at, again and again, with desire,” then, judging by what we watch on screen, you’d have to say that we find violence to be beautiful. And judging by what we watch on screen, you could say that what we find most beautiful of all is vengeance.

If vengeance can be beautiful then it’s not contradictory for this lovely prophecy from Isaiah about blossoms and the crocus and the majesty of the mountains also to have vengeance right there in it. “Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.” Terrible recompense does seem necessary for there to be real justice, that is, for salvation to be more than an escape. For salvation to be righteous, then the bad guys have to be defeated plus punished.

So of course John the Baptist, in our gospel lesson, who by this time was in Guantanamo, had been doubting his cousin Jesus as the long-expected Messiah. And all those miracles of healing that he did are beside the point. Not just the symptoms but the system! Social work is nice, but a salvation worth giving your life for requires a revolution. "Listen, Jesus, didn’t your mother Mary ever teach you that revolutionary song she sang when you were still inside her womb?"

Vengeance is a second step in violence. I mean the violence of necessity, non-malicious violence. The first step in violence is defensive, when the aggression of another forces you to be violent back, or when the government wields the sword to keep the peace, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty.

But from punishment it’s a short next step to vengeance. Vengeance is aggression that claims its rightness, vengeance claims justice, vengeance assumes real grievance, blood crying out, a debt unpaid, somebody getting away with something, an upset in the moral equilibrium requiring further violence to get the balance back.

Last Monday I was in my bodega getting a coffee and a neighbor was looking at The Daily News with its report on the death of that three-year old boy who had been tortured by his father. She said, “That father should be tortured and killed, he deserves it.” She said, “You know I used to work at Rikers, and if he goes there, they’ll know what to do with him, they’ll torture him and kill him like he deserves. You know they have an ethic there.” Vengeance is violence that claims an ethic.

Well, I can tell you that the ethic of the Bible, in both Testaments, for all of the Bible’s violence, is that vengeance is absolutely reserved for God. The Torah does prescribe regulations to put limits on vengeance, thus admitting it, but the right to vengeance is fundamentally denied to humans, and the Book of Judges tells of the general misery for everyone when vengeance is allowed.

So I have to say that the current alliance between the Christian-right and the NRA is not only unbiblical but also would have been unthinkable to the conservative Protestant Republicans of my childhood, like my parents. It’s the historic ethic of the Christian church that private persons are not allowed to initiate any violence, no matter how bad the other guy, and if blood cries out, that is up to the government.

But how about if they keep getting away with it? What was remarkable in this latest presidential campaign is that both sides complained that the candidate of the other kept getting away with doing wrong. And the big banks keep getting away with it, hedgefund traders, multinationals, ExxonMobil, tobacco companies. How could God allow Hitler and Stalin and Mao and whoever else to get away with all their murderous evil for so long? That’s the complaint against God that I hear most often from people who reject belief, and the most telling complaint, I think. Evil gets away with it.

At the more personal level we grumble, we grumble from a sense of grievance. This is what is addressed by our epistle. That spiritual root of bitterness which can grow into the choking vine of vengeance. And what the epistle calls for is patience. Not patience as passivity, but specifically active patience, “heart-strengthened” patience, robust patience, a kind of activity and busy-ness that leaves the outcome open to God. Doing Christian action but trusting God with the outcome.

Witnessing, for example, as I said last week. Witnesses in the forms of unmasking and advocating. First, unmasking the full extent of violence in all of its subtlety and toleration, unmasking the reality of its misery even when the use of it cannot be avoided. Second, advocating for the silent victims of violence, especially when that violence is done by otherwise respectable governments and institutions—advocating for the meek of the earth.

In both unmasking and advocating being witnesses, even when our witness is unpopular. But then, and here’s the hardest part, not being the jury or the judge, that is, leaving the verdict up to God, and still being hopeful, and still being loving, which takes an awful lot of patience, and an awful lot of trust in God.

To respond to evil not with vengeance but with witnessing is what I mean by active patience, and active patience is what I’m calling anti-violence. But to maintain this active patience requires some Christian disciplines. And the two Christian disciplines that I’m going to recommend to you today are penitence and joy.

Penitence is the opposite of grievance. Your grievances are real, so your penitence has to be just as real. Penitence is when you stop judging others and you judge yourself. Penitence is when you take yourself off the throne of your Cartesian autocracy, with all your rights and privilege pertaining thereto, and you take your place among the petitioners, among the humble, even among the guilty, and “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Lenten penitence is mortification, preparing to die. Advent penitence is about surrendering your place, giving up your nice room at the inn to bed down in the stable. Advent penitence is surrendering your right to your grievances. Anti-violence.

The opposite of bitterness is joy. Because the real endurance of real grievances give real cause for bitterness, you have to cultivate joy. As a discipline. You know the Bible is remarkable in that it commands you to love, when love is usually considered a feeling; a feeling is raised into an ethic. Just so the Bible commands joy, and another feeling is raised into an ethic. Not that you can force the feeling of joy. But you cultivate the attitudes of joy, the patterns of joy, the language of joy, even the habits of joy.

The pattern of joy is signified by the command “re-joice,” which in Latin is gaudete, and Gaudete is the traditional name of the Third Sunday of Advent and the reason for the candle’s color being rose. Today you are commanded to rejoice, and so today you have to ask yourself what right do you have not to be joyful? Your cultivation of joy is your active antidote to bitterness, and your penitence reminds you that you have no enduring right to bitterness. Occasions for bitterness will certainly come, as your anti-violence will be met by unfair opposition, so you’ll need to practice joy in order to keep on going in your anti-violence.

Penitence and joy are the means. The end is love. I invite you to the anti-vengeance that is love, that love of God that is so humble that it surrenders every right and privilege and takes on flesh in the stable among the poor and the beasts. Find yourself in this great mystery of God’s love for you.

Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

December 4, Advent 2, Violence #2: Justice

Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19, Romans 15:4-13, Matthew 3:1-12

Let me list the animals, vegetables, and minerals in our lessons today. We get a wolf, a leopard, a bear, and twice a lion. We get a lamb, a kid, a calf, a veal-calf, a cow, and an ox. We get three poisonous snakes: an asp, an adder, and vipers. We get locusts, we get camel’s hair, we get honey, wheat, the husk, and straw. We get a tree stump, a shoot, a branch, and thrice a root. We get an ax on the roots and trees chopped down and burned. We get fire twice, and water, and wind. We get the sea, rain, showers, mown fields, little hills, and mountains twice. We get stones, the children of stones, and children of Abraham. We get a little child, a nursing child, and a weaned child.

Quote: “And a little child shall lead them.” It’s a children’s parade. That was the sermon preached on these lessons six years ago by our seminary intern Rachel Daley. That sermon was so wonderful that we made a picture book of it and gave it to Rachel as a present. A little child shall lead them. And that little child must be Jesus, we Christians cannot help but think.

It is a principle of Jewish and Christian theology that a prophecy can mean more than the prophet intended, so I can doubt that Isaiah foresaw the child as the Messiah, but as a beneficiary of the Messiah and of the peace that the Messiah would bring. Isaiah was predicting the return of the king, the revival of the cut-off dynasty of David, of the chopped-down House of Jesse. The king would bring justice back with him (the first part of the prophecy), and his justice would result in peace (the second part of the prophecy). But here’s the thing: to bring that justice would require some violence.

This is the second sermon in my Advent series on violence. Why this topic? Because violence is on the increase in our nation and the world, and being accepted as making us great again, so if the baby in the manger is the Prince of Peace, then we must understand from what he’s saving us.

Last week I made the claim that violence is natural and of necessity. We should not be surprised at it, nor sentimental nor even idealistic in our facing it. But just because violence is natural and necessary does not mean Christians should choose for it. Do we not choose against the natural necessities of illness, and scarcity, and death? Why not then also violence? But we can only do this as believers. Governments themselves cannot. All governments are violent, no matter how they justify their violence, as they must do. So how do we Christians make our way in this?

The Bible holds together two realities about government: First, government is ordained by God for our good, and it wields the sword to chastise the wicked and protect the good. You get this in our Psalm for today, and also in the writings of St. Paul.

Second, government is the Beast from the great abyss, or idolatrous Babylon, the constant source of persecution and injustice. You get this in the prophets, the Book of Revelation, and the predictions of the Lord Jesus.

Both realities more or less take form in every government, the USA included, and both realities, whether for justice or oppression, resort to the same power of the sword. Both realities use violence.

We just heard John the Baptist predicting a violent Messiah, leading a holy war, chopping, slashing, and burning. His images are violent, but violence for good, as every revolution justifies itself against the oppressor. He was right about the Messiah, but wrong about the Messiah’s plans.

What the Lord Jesus would have to show by his teaching and example, and by his life and his death would have to explore for the first time ever, was his radical freedom from nature and necessity, such that he could accomplish justice and rightness in a way that was absolutely anti-violent.

That was not a given. As I said last week, the Bible is full of violence, not only by its heroes but even by God. So it’s wonderful that Jesus, while he was still living at home in Nazareth in those quiet years before he was announced by John the Baptist, when he meditated on those prophecies that saw the Messiah as a warrior, leading a revolution of the saints, wielding the sword of justice to vindicate the poor, defending the meek by smashing heads, that he chose instead a very different course, as yet untried by anyone, and one that he could tell he’d have to pay for with his life.

How did he choose against the natural necessity of violence? Because he did not judge by what his eyes saw, which we cannot help but do, nor did he decide by what his ears heard, which we have no choice but do. Because we are natural people we live by the laws of necessity and the sad wisdom of our experience—that if the wolf lies down with the lamb, that’s it for the lamb, and a child who puts her hand over a snake-pit gets dead. We have good reason to doubt the choice for anti-violence when we judge by our own knowledge and experience.

But honest experience also confronts us with the laws of violence no weaker than the laws of nature. It’s the law of violence that once you resort to violence, even in the name of good, you cannot stop it. Once you resort to violence, your adversary will as well. Once you give yourself the right to violence, you cannot refuse your adversary that same right. The law of violence is that violence begets more violence, to use it is never to control it, and even if you gain your objective it’s always a net loss down the road. The misery of violence is recognized by realism no less than its necessity. The Lord Jesus was realistic, not idealistic, and he chose for anti-violence.

The prophecy says he was able to do this because the spirit of the Lord rested on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord should be greater than your fear of anything else. That gives you a certain freedom. Not freedom from the emotion of fear, which is a healthy thing, but freedom from the tyranny and the control of fear, which is what violence depends on. As I said last week, we are offered not freedom from violence  but freedom within violence.

We can exercise our Christian freedom in two ways, and both ways are forms of witness. Both ways of witness I have learned from the writing of Jacques Ellul, a Christian sociologist who served in the French Underground in World War II, and knew first hand what he was talking about.

First, we witness to the awful truth of violence whenever we find ourselves in the necessity of participating in it, say for the defense of a loved one or even of the civil state. Not that we act with reluctance or sad faces, but that we bear witness to Jesus Christ and his kingdom from within it as best that we know how. For how else shall we love our enemies. It is the law of violence that its users, be they oppressors or freedom fighters, always justify its use as good, and it is the job of Christians to unmask the long-range evil of it all, despite the claims and glories of the victors.

Second, we witness to the experience of the victims of violence who are silent or ignored. We Christians must use our good reputation with those who are in power to advocate to them on behalf of those victims whose victimization is unremarked and tolerated. In the words of Isaiah, the poor and the meek of the earth, no matter how depressed or despicable those victims might be. Even good governments are violent, even in subtle and painless ways, even just by negligence. Even good governments have their silent victims, and we who are good Christian citizens have the thankless and even ridiculous task of witnessing to the powerful on their behalf. We do this not for our own success, but the love of Jesus for such folks constrains us.

If we do these things we will be misunderstood. We will have to contend with other Christians and people of good will. And for some of these things, only the Rosa Parkses among us should we designate to do it, and the rest of us support it. I mean, the base line, according to St. Paul elsewhere (First Thessalonians), is that we should all live our lives in quiet, minding our own affairs. We do this in part to earn the respect and gain the ear of those who are in power and have the advantage of the violence around us, so that we can witness on behalf of those whom they do not so respect.

You  desire justice and order in the world. And you desire God, and you seek the vision of God. This vision gives you unfinished business. Advent is all about feeling unfinished. Be open to it, and wait for the coming of the Lord. “Isaiah says, ‘The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the nations; in him the nations shall hope.’ May the God of hope fill you with all joy and hope in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” 

Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.