Well, howdy. Well, I've told you all the time or two that I'm a comic book fan. I've enjoyed collecting them from time to time.
Had a bunch whenever I was younger and then got back into collecting a few of them in my 30s as well.
I can't believe I can say that something happened back in my 30s. That's a little frightening.
But one of the things while I was grabbing a few was that I had found this store where you could let them know, hey, I would like to have these comics when they come out.
So then that way you can make sure that even if you weren't there on the very day that they came out, you at least had one sitting there waiting for you.
And I remember there was the Justice League and they had a new run, the new 52 series that had come out.
And I was thinking, oh man, this is great. I'm going to have the number one issue. I know it's going to be worth more. This is going to be great.
And I walked in and they said, oh, hey, here are your comics. By the way, we weren't able to get you the first run for the Justice League.
We have the eighth edition for you. And I just stared at this thing as I'm looking at it.
It was like, I don't want the eighth edition. Oh my goodness. The first edition is worth something. The second was even worth something.
Even kind of sort of the third. I managed to somehow not even get fourth through seventh.
And it was like I'm looking at this comic and realizing anybody could get this comic. Oh my goodness.
Why in the world did I go to all this bother to get a subscription when I'm just going to get exactly what anybody else would get right off of the shelf?
What was even the point? And then I went back home, read the comic and realized that I am a grown adult and I should probably worry about other things instead.
But what is the point sometimes about trying to get something special if all you're getting is what everybody else gets anyway?
See, that's one of the things that we end up looking at in today's section. This part of the Beatitudes that Jesus has said is to really start off with this question of what is even the point of loving your friends?
What's the point of just loving your friends? What's the point of just loving the people who are already nice to you?
Because that's pretty standard anyway. Why would Jesus need to make a whole sermon about saying, oh hey, you should be nice to people, but especially the ones who are nice to you already?
And what we end up seeing is this list of things that are on here to love your enemies, to do good to those who hate you, to bless the ones who curse you, to pray for the ones who abuse you,
offering the other cheek when you've been struck or when they take your outer garment to offer them your undergarment as well.
And this whole list of things, it seems so strange. I mean, why in the world would you want to love people who have been cruel to you, who have treated you poorly?
If someone has wronged you, shouldn't it make sense to do the same thing to them in return? Or even more than that, do you really want to keep getting abused?
That does not make any sense. We don't want to allow the person who abuses us to abuse us any longer. That's not okay. We know that part.
Or even more than that, if they take your cloak, you give them your tunic as well. I mean, that's almost kind of like, oh hey, you took my clothing, I'll give you my underwear as well.
That just sounds like a terrible idea in every sense of the term. So why is it that Jesus is going through this list because it doesn't seem to make any sense?
It's not normal. It's not normal to hear things like this. But maybe we're supposed to pause and say, isn't that the point?
Aren't we supposed to not be normal when we follow Jesus?
Now, some of these, granted, are trying to make a point, but isn't the point really supposed to be deeper than what we are naturally going to do?
If someone is hurting you, if someone is hateful towards you, doesn't it take more to try to show them love and compassion than it would your typical friends?
And I want to give you an example to try to help make a little bit more sense of this.
Because what would happen if I were to say to you the Hatfields and the McCoy's?
Now, hopefully, most of you, when you hear the phrase, the Hatfields and the McCoy's, you're typically going to be thinking of this giant feud that lasted for decades.
It's a term, it's a phrase, it's an idea, these people that any time that you think of one group hating another where the families keep going back and forth, it comes back to this idea.
You might also think of this as the Montague's and the Capulets back in the day with Romeo and Juliet, but this is the American version.
So we have our own, okay? We have our own on this side of the pond.
So the thing, if you look at what the Hatfields and McCoy's actually were going through, they were living on either side of this tug fork tributary which came into the Big Sandy River between West Virginia and Kentucky.
This was back at the end of the Civil War.
And what happened was, most of them in both families had actually been in the Confederacy.
So the Hatfields and the McCoy's, the Hatfields were led by Devil Ant's Hatfield and the McCoy's were led by O'Rannell McCoy.
But there was this one person, Asa Harmon McCoy.
The one out of all of them that fought for the Union.
Now they were coming back, but when they had come back from the war, what ended up happening is that there was a group called the Logan Wildcats.
It was a part of the Confederacy and they were being led by Jim Vance, the uncle of Devil Ant's, who ended up going and murdering Asa Harmon McCoy.
Now at this point, you might be saying, well, you understand the tensions, but was that the beginning of the feud?
Well, it keeps going.
Apparently, later down the line, there was a dispute over a hog that was stolen.
It turned out that Randal McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield of stealing his hog.
The courts sided with Floyd Hatfield, but apparently the McCoy's never let that part go.
It kept going.
Apparently, they also had a love dispute happening where Rosanna McCoy decided to run off to be with Johnson Hatfield.
And Johnson was arrested by the McCoy's, but then rescued by the Hatfields.
Now, interestingly enough, Johnson ended up later leaving Rosanna for her cousin Nancy McCoy.
Apparently, he couldn't leave the drama out of things.
But later on, ended up finding out that Ellison Hatfield was mortally wounded by the McCoy's, and the Hatfields then kidnapped and murdered the McCoy brothers.
Even more so, on New Year's Day in 1888, it got to the point where the Hatfields attacked the McCoy's, killed two of the children, and burned the house down.
It even went to the Supreme Court, where seven of them were, seven of the Hatfields were imprisoned for life.
One was executed, and on a quick note is that Johnson was actually imprisoned for life, which may or may not have made Rosanna a little bit happy.
On a quick note, it's believed that the McCoy's might have actually had a genetic disease that led them to anger,
but even more than that, the true symbolism of this feud was that in 1979, the Hatfields and the McCoy's appeared on the family feud, to the point where, even though the Hatfields won more money,
that week the McCoy's won more games, so they ended up adding to their money so that they won just a little bit more.
But where did the cycle, where was the cycle truly able to have been ended?
Could it have been ended back with the hog?
Could it have been ended whenever Asa Harman McCoy was murdered?
Or even at that point, would the Hatfields have said no, it was actually the McCoy's fault for letting their child go off to be in the Union Army?
At what point is it that the cycle starts, and when can it end?
And that's a big piece of what we end up seeing here, is this question of how do we end the cycle?
Whenever we are continually figuring out that someone else deserves what they have coming to them,
at what point does it stop going back and forth, and we continue wondering when will it ever end?
There have been times whenever I've either owned or been helping to watch somebody's dogs, and you have to go to the local dog park.
And one of the things that's always noted on there is to pick up after your own dog.
And one of the things that I found out though culturally, is that whenever you see something lying on the ground that needs to be picked up,
which I will not say specifically in this sermon, is that it's sort of this natural sense of courtesy.
Now, if you were to then say, well, it's not from my dog, I don't need to pick it up, what ends up being the problem here?
Shouldn't everybody just take care of their own issues, pick up after their own selves?
But here's the issue, do you always see every single moment of what's happening with your dog during the entire time at the dog park?
Isn't it more likely that you'll end up missing something?
And isn't that possible for the person that you're sure deserves your judgment?
The thing with what we end up seeing is that going above and beyond is acknowledging that all of us have truly needed some level of forgiveness.
Because when we do not find a way to forgive, we're pretending that we deserve more love than others did.
Whenever we do not take the time to pause and say how we can love those who we treat as our enemies,
we end up ignoring that we at some point were somebody else's enemy.
Whenever we don't take that extra step, we miss out on the fact that true repentance realizes that we've all sinned and that we're all capable.
When we look between the two Gospels, between Luke 6 and Matthew 5,
and we end up seeing in Matthew 5 it says, whenever a soldier forces you to walk a mile, go another mile.
Or whenever somebody has taken from you, give them even more.
Because in reality, there was actually a law that said if somebody took your cloak, they could not take anything else from you.
But what ends up happening is that person now has power over you,
not just by demonstrating what they could make you do, but also in what they're now doing inside of your heart.
They have now taken control of you, because now inside of you is the desire to get back what was taken from you.
But if we were to go further and to give more than what is expected,
or to not demand back what it was that we had given in the first place,
that ends up allowing us to be in charge of the narrative,
or to even realize how much we have to give in the first place.
There's a story from 2019 about Charlotte Evans.
Her little boy, Cassin, was killed at three years old when he was shot.
It turned out that she was going through all this time of sorrow and grief at this drive by shooting,
and ended up feeling so many of these emotions in regard to Raymond Johnson,
who had pulled the trigger back in 1995.
See, Johnson had been a teenager, stupid, foolish.
But with that, he had been sentenced to life behind bars without the possibility of parole.
Over time, the sentence was still there, but after many, many years, there was the possibility of parole.
And what ended up happening is that Johnson ended up reaching out to Evans from prison.
The man who had killed her child ended up asking her if she would consider adopting him as her son.
And here was this mother who had lost her son, saying inside of herself,
I will forgive, yes, I will forgive, but I don't want to do it.
And even as her chest is hurting, and Evans sees Johnson realizing the pain that he had caused her,
and they end up sitting there, working through the pain, to the point where he reaches out,
and she realizes that this was the way for her forgiveness to become real.
And now, at a time when Johnson would be eligible to be released after another two more years,
is that she says, I can truly say I love the young man and love him enough to take him as a son and care for him.
Because even though she had lost a son, only by letting go could she have the opportunity to have a son in her life.
Or even more than that, when Mary Johnson ends up experiencing the death of her child,
and she ends up welcoming the man who murdered her son, O'Shea Israel, into her home and heart.
See, it turns out that her 20-year-old son had gotten into a scuffle with a 16-year-old.
And while O'Shea had killed her son and spent 17 years in prison,
she was furious, believing him to be an animal and deserving to be caged.
But she knew as she visited him prison, I wanted to know if you were in the same mindset of what I remembered from court,
where I wanted to go over and hurt you.
But I knew you were not that 16-year-old anymore, and I shared with you about who my son was.
And when he was released from prison after all those years, she became a mother figure and a mentor to O'Shea.
As I share that, and we ask the question, must I love my enemies? Really.
I can't help but wonder how many of you, as you are hearing these stories, inside are judging the women for forgiving the young men.
How many of us, as we listen to these stories, how many of us don't pause to say what love they have,
and how much forgiveness is inside of them, how much it is inside, that instead we are responding with,
how stupid are you for letting go of your anger?
See, that's the thing with this, is it's not even just the question of would we be able to do the same,
but even more than that, would we be willing to understand?
See, there are many examples of those who have lost the loved one, who have offered forgiveness to the ones who have hurt them,
and the ones that they love the most.
But deep down inside, are we even willing to understand why God would even want this forgiveness in the first place?
But more than that, when we do so, how is it that that bitterness and anger goes even further into our lives?
There's a portion with our scripture passage, that when it says,
judge not so that you will not be judged, and it speaks in descriptions about the oil that is running over.
It ends up pointing out, in this whole section, about the press, and being able to squeeze out what was in there in the first place.
It shows in here, good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap.
It's talking about the oil that ends up being poured out upon us, and that oil that anoints us,
can anoint us with either good or evil, as it speaks of the fruits that come from the tree.
Because what we discover is that as we have judged people, it not only ends up pointing to one person,
but it also ends up flowing out to those around us.
How we eventually start to say, this type of people, this group of people,
I have seen the hatred and the murder from this one, so now I will now judge not just the one,
but I will judge anybody that seems like them.
And that's the thing about this, is that this doesn't seem to make much sense to us, but it's not supposed to.
Because if the things that made sense to us were really the things that would actually change the world,
would we have even needed Jesus in the first place?
But the thing about Jesus is that we're meant to change the world by grace.
See, that's what we end up seeing here, is that when we are so consumed with the anger and the enmity towards others,
we end up discovering that we let that flow out to everybody.
And all we end up seeing in our world is continued retribution, judgment, hatred,
trying to give back what was given to us in return.
And believe me, we as Christians, we can be just as good at the judgment and the hatred as everybody else.
We've been given all of this, so shouldn't we now have the opportunity to do it in return?
But when we do so, we end up ignoring how we have also added to the situations we see in the world.
Because we feel justified in what it is that we hold on to, we miss out on how we ended up creating the sins and the hatred in this world, right alongside everyone else.
But that's the thing about being those who follow after Christ, is instead of letting our judgment flow out,
not just on a person that we don't care to understand, not just on a group of people that seem so much like them,
and not even just ignoring how we ourselves did it.
But instead, we as Christians are the ones who are supposed to stop the cycle.
We're the ones who are meant to understand the grace of God first for ourselves, then for the rest of the world,
and especially for the ones who have hurt us.
Because that's the thing about this, is that grace truly becomes real when it's been shared.
Because it keeps saying time and time again, judge not and you will not be judged, forgive and you will be forgiven.
Condemn not and you will not be condemned.
Because God wants us to have his mercy and his grace.
But the more we hold on to everything else, the less we truly understand how it's meant for us.
So this morning, we look at a world where we continue to see evil given in exchange for evil.
My question to you is this, do you truly want the oil that comes from you to be from good fruit or from evil?
Because not only if we want our own lives to know Christ, but also for the world to know Him as well,
then maybe we need to take the time to ask, can we truly be willing to love our enemies and to give them good in exchange for evil?
Thanks be to God.