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Thursday, September 29, 2016

Bible Study Podcast: JEHOVAH-CARE IN LEVITICUS CHAPTERS 12 & 13

This is the first attempt at what will become regular recordings of our weekly Bible study teachings. I apologize in advance for the halting delivery. I really do get nervous when it comes to God’s Word and teaching is a different mental placement than preaching so the nerves come through more because I knew I was recording.
I welcome your comments and suggestions for how to make the Bible study a worthwhile podcast.
Listen well.


If you can’t get the audio on your device, visit the main podcast page athttp://revandersongraves.podomatic.com/
The podcast is on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/anderson-graves-podcast/id918990482
---Anderson T. Graves II is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.
Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama; executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO); and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).
Subscribe to my personal blog www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves
Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves #Awordtothewise
You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.
You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.
Support by check or money order may be mailed to
Miles Chapel CME Church
P O Box 132
Fairfield, Al 35064

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

THE FIRST “FIRST 48” Blogging the book of Genesis

 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?”
He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
And He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground. So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. A fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth.”
-         And Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear!
. . .  And the Lord said to him, “Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him. (Genesis 4: 9-15)


There were two young men, brothers, from a good family.  Cain, the elder brother, had been upset about something that happened at church, but when he invited his brother Abel over to talk it seemed that they would quickly move past the latest episode of their sibling rivalry.  The day went on, the night came, the sun rose again, but only Cain had come home, and the story became an investigation. 

The investigation led to an indictment.  The indictment to trial.  Trial to sentence. In our place and time, police investigate, prosecutors indict and bring to trial, and judges (directly or indirectly) decide guilt, innocence, and sentence.  Police, district attorneys, and judges are agents of the state.  Therefore, the state is in charge of every stage in the story.

In  the State vs. Cain (more commonly known as Cain vs. Abel), God is the state.  The Lord Himself investigates, prosecutes, and presides over the first criminal trial.  Cain vs. Abel is the first and ultimate setter of precedent for the Christian view of a just legal system. 

How does a godly court system function?  We can know by looking back at the case where God was “the State.”

INVESTIGATION
In verses 9 and 10, God questioned Cain, but he denied any knowledge of the crime.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?”
He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Keep in mind that God knew that Cain was guilty.  Human prosecutors often say they’re certain of defendants’ guilt, but they aren’t omniscient.  Even when there’s a signed confession, human prosecutors don’t literally KNOW.  God KNEW Cain was guilty, but God still let Cain speak.

From verses 9-15, we hear as often from Cain as we hear from God.  The Lord didn’t silence or suppress the voice of the accused.

Verse 10 states that God let the voice of Abel’s blood speak.  In other words, God the investigator didn’t suppress any forensic evidence.

PROSECUTION
God let the accused talk, and He spoke for the victim.  God demonstrated that one could pursue justice for victims and simultaneously be fair to the accused. 

TRIAL
God referred to physical evidence in declaring Cain guilty. Cain wasn’t guilty because of his character, his religious practices, his skin tone, upbringing, or affiliations.  Cain wasn’t guilty because he ran or acted suspiciously.  God ruled according to truth and evidence.

SENTENCING
The crime was murder.  A quick scan of Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy and you’re sure that God believes in the death penalty.  But, in the very first criminal proceeding in Biblical history, where the defendant is guilty of unprovoked, unjustifiable, probably premeditated, murder --- God did not sentence the defendant to death.

Cain was given life in exile without parole. (Genesis 4:11, 12)

POST-SENTENCING
Cain appealed his sentence, and God listened to him.  GOD let the convicted criminal speak.  GOD actually considered the arguments of a convicted felon when said felon questioned the severity of the consequences of his sentencing.

Cain was caught, convicted, and sentenced.  However, God still treated him like ---- like a child of God whose life and thoughts had value.

Cain’s argument on appeal was prophetic. 
And Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! . . . it will happen that anyone who finds me will kill me.” (Genesis 4:13, 14)

In other words, “Now, my life is devalued.  I’m going into a culture where anyone could kill me and get away with it just because I’m a convicted felon.”

The Mark
Verse 15 indicates that God thought that Cain had a valid point.  God meant for Cain to fulfill his sentence, but God did not want the criminal conviction to devalue Cain’s life.   

Police kill unarmed Black men and women, but we justify it because:

“He was a convicted felon.”

“She’d been arrested before.”

“He looks like a bad dude.”

Unsworn citizens kill unarmed Black men and women, but we defend them because the victim

“. . . was suspended from school for smoking weed.”

“. . . was throwing up gang sings on his Facebook page.”

“. . . looked suspicious.”

We justify the murder of those whose past or presence marks them to us as guilty. 

How does God mark the guilty?

And the Lord said to Cain, “Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him.
The mark of Cain was not part of Cain’s punishment.  The mark was the certificate of God’s protection. 

In contemporary terms, the mark of Cain was a special policy enacted by God declaring that it was a severe felony to kill a previously convicted person and use their previous convictions as justification.

In the very first criminal proceeding, God declared that you can’t kill people cause of what they used to do.  You can’t shoot a man because he looks like “a bad dude.”  You can’t fatally apply an illegal chokehold because he didn’t want to be handcuffed for selling cigarettes without a license.   You can’t shoot an unarmed child, woman, or man and after the fact, search social media for an image of them looking guilty.

For that, God said vengeance shall be taken on you sevenfold.

That punishment to the seventh power isn’t proposed for the felons.  It is promised to the people, to the society that says #alllivesmatter, but functions as if some lives matter much less.

Sometimes you just "know" someone is guilty.  You are so sure of it that no evidence or argument will dissuade you.  Evens so, for those of us who claim to follow the God of the Bible, there are limits to how we punish the guilty.

Christians should not operate systems in which the voice of the accused is silenced or evidence is suppressed.  Christians should not accept investigations and prosecutions in which the state or its agents presume guilt based on what they “know” from subconsciously biased feelings, intuitions, and perceptions.  Christians must never dehumanize the incarcerated, take aware their voices, or summarily dismiss their complaints.  Christians have to recognize that sometimes the guilty have a valid point.

And, critically, immediately, Christians must leap off the bandwagon that hardens our hearts over the blood of men, women, and children killed in streets, in yards, on sidewalks, in jail cells, and in the parks where they play.  Even if they were guilty, God says that they deserve better than that.


---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves  #Awordtothewise 

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 
Miles Chapel CME Church
P O Box 132
Fairfield, Al 35064





Sunday, September 18, 2016

YOU ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER

Has anyone ever asked you a question right after you’d given them the answer to the question they just asked?  Why do they do that?  Why does the church do that?  In John 14, 3 disciples ask Jesus a set of questions which tested the Lord’s patience, but their questions and the Lord’s answers reveal important principles for Christians then and now.

We continue our sermonic journey through the book of John with a message titled: YOU ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER.


Listen well.

If you can’t get the audio on your device, visit the main podcast page at http://revandersongraves.podomatic.com/

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves  #Awordtothewise 

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 
Miles Chapel CME Church
P O Box 132
Fairfield, Al 35064


Sunday, September 11, 2016

WHEN YOU KNOW THEY ARE GOING TO DO YOU WRONG

You know how bad it feels after you learn that someone you trusted has done you wrong?  Well, Jesus understood the truth in people’s hearts before they spoke.  So imagine how the Lord felt knowing that the person smiling at His table was going to betray, deny, and abandon Him.  That’s what Jesus dealt with at the Last Supper, and that’s what the church is called to deal with.

The title of the sermon is: WHEN YOU KNOW THEY ARE GOING TO DO YOU WRONG.


Listen well.

If you can’t get the audio on your device, visit the main podcast page at http://revandersongraves.podomatic.com/

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves  #Awordtothewise 

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 
Miles Chapel CME Church
P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Has God Surely Said?


Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”
And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”
Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1-5)

The serpent was slick (figuratively and literally).  He mixed his lies with God’s truth the way an assassin uses wine to mask the taste of poison or a politician uses a national distress to obscure a grab for power.  The snake said that knowing good and evil would make the humans more like God, but he conveniently neglected to stipulate that they still wouldn’t be gods. They’d just be mortals with the knowledge of how thoroughly they’d screwed up.

The funny thing is, we still fall for that half-truth.  We shorten the name of the forbidden tree to the “tree of knowledge” as if defying God brings enlightenment and omniscience.  But the tree didn’t give all knowledge, only the awareness of good and evil.

Like God, humanity became instinctively aware that every choice in every moment holds good options and bad options.  Unlike God, we don’t omnisciently know which option is which.  So here we are with all the accumulated knowledge of human history just a Google search away on our phones and we still can’t figure out how to make the world better without almost every time also making it worse.

Adam and Eve had been naked and unashamed, but, after they listed to their snaky friend, they knew so doggone much that they no longer knew if being naked was a good thing or a bad thing.  Maybe they should be less open with one another.  Maybe it wasn’t so good to let your spouse know EVERY thing about you.  Maybe they should hide certain parts of themselves from each other.   It hadn’t been a problem before, but now every choice had a pro and a con.
 
The serpent told Eve that she wouldn’t “surely die,” and Eve did not drop dead the moment she ate from the forbidden tree.  God didn’t strike Adam down when he bit into the forbidden fruit.  They didn’t immediately die, but they did “surely die.”

They lost access to the tree of life that could have healed them from all injuries (Revelations 22:2).  They were evicted from Eden where food grew easily and the animals lived in harmony with them.  The entire ecology of the planet mutated and they exchanged potential immortality in Paradise for an existence that “is of few days and full of trouble” (Job 14:1).  

Humanity gained the knowledge of good and evil and lost everything else, and that is why we have religion.

A friend recently argued with me that religion is a human invention, created to foster division and impose power over others.  I disagreed.  I disagree.

In Genesis 3, God set aside His right as Creator and Judge to destroy our progenitors for their disobedience.  He posted their bail by promising a human descendant who would pay the price for their sins and undo the damage the serpent had done.

“And I will put enmity
Between you [the serpent] and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.” (Genesis 3:15)

God injected the hope of Messiah into human history. 

In verse 21, God took the life of an unblemished (cause everything in Eden was perfect) animal and used its skin to cover the man and woman who now saw themselves through the stained glass of sin and shame.

God Himself made the first sacrifice for sin. 

Religion is the means by which sinful humanity pursues reconciliation with holy God.  Religion is a partnership between humanity and the divine.  Each played their part in creating that partnership.  Man pioneered sin, and God invented religion.

Even if you don’t take Biblical Creation literally and you read the beginning of Genesis as an allegory for the long evolution of Earth and humanity from the big bang to literate homo sapiens, logic still demonstrates that God, not people, created religion.

Humans developed medicine and defenses to protect life, but life itself is a gift from God.  God gave us food; we just figured out how to cook and cultivate it.  We form social units but the need to connect with others and to improve our condition is written into our DNA; we didn’t write it.  The impulse to worship God is hardwired into our brains, coded there by the same hand that designed us for nurture, technology, and love.

“Know that the Lord, He is God.  It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3).

Religion is a gift from God --- a gift we have marred and manipulated for sinful ends, but then how is that any different from what we’ve done with all of God’s other gifts?

Eve and Adam screwed over Paradise because they believed the serpent’s half-truths beautifully packaged and cleverly delivered, more than the plain words of God.

It’s about time we stop repeating the same mistake.

Has God surely said?
                                 
Yes, He surely has.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves  #Awordtothewise 

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 
Miles Chapel CME Church
P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064

Sunday, September 4, 2016

CLEAN FEET UNDER THE LORD'S TABLE (audio of Sunday's sermon)

The title of the sermon is: CLEAN FEET UNDER THE LORD’S TABLE.


Listen well.

If you can’t get the audio on your device, visit the main podcast page at http://revandersongraves.podomatic.com/

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves  #Awordtothewise 

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 
Miles Chapel CME Church
P O Box 132
Fairfield, Al 35064