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Transcript

10/11/26 Party Crashers · Omnia Christus

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was in San Diego not long ago for a wedding.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the young adults from here were getting married there.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And there were some party crashers they found at that wedding.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they came in and told me about that.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, oh, you know, they caught some party crashers outside at the wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: I said, well, how did they...
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  SPEAKER_00: How did they find them?
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  SPEAKER_00: How did they know they were party crashers?
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the wedding was half Polish, half Vietnamese wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: So there's probably lots of people that don't know each other or don't,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, look like each other, you know.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, well,
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  SPEAKER_00: they're acting kind of weird and they're going around,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, taking selfies with themselves.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm still not convinced people do that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, oh,
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  SPEAKER_00: they're also just,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, kind of dressed in jeans, like they just came off the street.
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  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, that makes sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because we all just came from church,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: we're all at church at the wedding,
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  SPEAKER_00: went over to the venue, everybody was dressed in their Sunday best.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so it was easy to see these people who came in and,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, were grabbing champagne and so forth were not.
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  SPEAKER_00: Part of the wedding feast because they weren't dressed the way that everyone else was dressed.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was easy to see.
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  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: they called security and security threw them out to where there is wailing
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  SPEAKER_00: and gnashing of teeth.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And, um,
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  SPEAKER_00: I just thought it was a,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's a kind of a way of helping us perhaps to understand the gospel
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  SPEAKER_00: that we have today.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because this gospel can be hard to understand.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I was at the prison yesterday reflecting with the prisoners on this gospel.
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  SPEAKER_00: And one of the guys said, he said, oh, you know, it's kind of interesting.
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  SPEAKER_00: This guy, he was too poor.
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  SPEAKER_00: To get a wedding garment and he got thrown out.
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  SPEAKER_00: No, that's not what the story is saying.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not what's going on here.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not the lesson here.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not who this king is.
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  SPEAKER_00: If we look at this story and we understand what it's saying,
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  SPEAKER_00: It's very clear that it is a story that shows exactly the opposite
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  SPEAKER_00: of what you might think.
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  SPEAKER_00: You might think, well,
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  SPEAKER_00: there's that kind of judgmental king of somebody who doesn't abide by
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  SPEAKER_00: the dress codes.
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's it for you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Check you out at this place.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not what it's saying at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, this king in the parable opens up his banquet and his house to everyone.
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  SPEAKER_00: To all those good and bad alike,
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  SPEAKER_00: it says, go out to the highways and the byways, bring everyone in.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want my banquet hall to be filled.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's not making distinctions between people who are coming in.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's very clear when he comes along and encounters this guy who does not have
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  SPEAKER_00: a wedding garment that he is choosing that.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not that he was too poor.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not that he was too bad.
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  SPEAKER_00: The banquet hall had been opened.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody had been provided for.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somehow this is something that this guy is choosing.
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  SPEAKER_00: He is choosing not to wear what everyone's wearing.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's choosing not to do what he needs to do to be at the wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's choosing to be crashing the party, so to speak.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so there are consequences for that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's why he's thrown out of the wedding in this parable.
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  SPEAKER_00: And of course, this parable is a parable and it's parable to tell us something.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's a parable to tell us something about our life in this world
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  SPEAKER_00: and perhaps our life in the next.
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  SPEAKER_00: It seems to be the Christ to try to tell us something about heaven, about the heavenly kingdom.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the opposite of that,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: that word which we don't like to say,
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  SPEAKER_00: which always says, oh, no, Father said that word, hell.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tells us something about hell, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: That word which,
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  SPEAKER_00: like I say,
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  SPEAKER_00: in English we consider almost even to be a bad word that we won't even say it.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it's a reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's a very technical term denoting a very clear reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: But what this gospel is helping us to see when it comes to the reality of hell is
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  SPEAKER_00: that hell means that if we want to, we can choose to.
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  SPEAKER_00: To reject God.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if we want to separate ourselves from God, we can do that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And hell is not some place where,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: those people that God doesn't like,
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  SPEAKER_00: he kind of kicks them out there, you know, too bad for them.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, they didn't abide by my little rules.
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  SPEAKER_00: They didn't check my little boxes here.
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  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, boom, they're going out on their backsides.
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  SPEAKER_00: No, that's not at all what hell is.
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  SPEAKER_00: What hell is, if it is anything, is that it is the possibility that we have of truly being free.
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  SPEAKER_00: God created us truly free.
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  SPEAKER_00: God created us so free that he's not going to impose himself on us.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's not going to say, you have to be with me.
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  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to.
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  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can choose to go somewhere else.
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  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
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  SPEAKER_00: Lewis in his little book, The Great Divorce, which is not about what you think it's about.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's about the divorce between heaven and hell.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not about what we usually call divorce.
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  SPEAKER_00: He has this interesting idea.
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  SPEAKER_00: And again,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's an imaginative concept,
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  SPEAKER_00: but he sees hell and purgatory as sort of being the same thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: He sees these people sort of being in this gray place where they go after death in
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  SPEAKER_00: which they're sort of trying to work through the different things that they've done
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  SPEAKER_00: in their life.
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  SPEAKER_00: And some people are drawing closer and closer to God through that experience.
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  SPEAKER_00: And some people are drawing further and further away and further and further into themselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there's sort of this ongoing process in which people either come up to heaven
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  SPEAKER_00: or else they keep going farther away.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not that they're ever sort of cast out.
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  SPEAKER_00: They themselves choose to go further and further away.
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  SPEAKER_00: He sees it sort of as this kind of endless gray city that he's in, that he's experiencing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And people keep moving further and further out because they don't like their neighbors.
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  SPEAKER_00: They don't like the people they're with.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I need to move further out, move further out.
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  SPEAKER_00: They move further and further out until they're like,
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  SPEAKER_00: some people are like, you know, way, way, way, hundreds, thousands of miles away.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that they're disconnected from God.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's that they're choosing to move further away.
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  SPEAKER_00: And God's still there.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it's like,
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  SPEAKER_00: if you choose to move further away from me, I'm not going to do anything about that.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that's an important thing, first of all, to know.
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  SPEAKER_00: That we do believe there is this reality of how.
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  SPEAKER_00: And all that means is that we can choose to reject God.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can choose to move ourselves away from God.
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  SPEAKER_00: And God's not going to force anything on us.
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  SPEAKER_00: But as far as who is there, it's another thing that Christ says in the Gospels.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's the funny thing about what Christ says in the Gospels is
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  SPEAKER_00: that we hear them and then they go through our mind and we don't really listen.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christ says in the Gospels, he says, do not judge lest you be judged.
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  SPEAKER_00: Do not condemn lest you be condemned.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we hear that and we don't really think about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then we go out and we judge everyone around us.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, we condemn everyone around us.
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  SPEAKER_00: And those people and those people are going to hell.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, those people that are They do not judge.
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  SPEAKER_00: Do not judge.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is for our Father to judge those.
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  SPEAKER_00: We don't stand to judgment over anyone.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can't condemn anyone.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is God who is over those people.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if we care about people,
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  SPEAKER_00: and if we think that people deserve a break,
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  SPEAKER_00: how much more does our Heavenly Father care about them?
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  SPEAKER_00: He made them.
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  SPEAKER_00: From all eternity thought about them, brought them into being, has given them everything.
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  SPEAKER_00: Does he not do everything possible for his children?
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  SPEAKER_00: That we have to know and that we have to trust.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we do not know that any particular person is in hell or is condemned.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church does not teach that and we do not know that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is incredibly important.
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  SPEAKER_00: We do believe that is there.
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  SPEAKER_00: We believe that it's a possibility.
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  SPEAKER_00: We believe that we have that possibility of falling off the bandwagon, if you will.
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  SPEAKER_00: But we do not know that anyone is there.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have to pray and hope that nobody is.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is our firm responsibility as Christians and as Catholics.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have to pray that all people are saved in the end.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, that doesn't mean they're going to have to do a lot of time, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: That's the beautiful thing about purgatory.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you're sort of, you know, Christian, you're like, well, it's either heaven or hell.
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  SPEAKER_00: No, for Catholics, there's that big space in between.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have this opportunity after our death to continue to grow in that process.
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  SPEAKER_00: Like C.S.
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  SPEAKER_00: Lewis talks about drawing closer to God, of being free.
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  SPEAKER_00: He talks about becoming more real.
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  SPEAKER_00: You see, sort of, you know, we're all kind of like sort of shades.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then as we draw closer to God, we become more real.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have this process that's open to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: And some people have done terrible things here.
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  SPEAKER_00: But if they, like the good thief next to Christ, repent...
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  SPEAKER_00: The gates of paradise are open to them too.
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  SPEAKER_00: And maybe they have to do some time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's a process of purification they have to go through.
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  SPEAKER_00: But we don't know that they will be cut off for all eternity.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is not our job to know.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is far, far above our pay grade.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not what we should be getting into.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have one responsibility and that's ourselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's myself.
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  SPEAKER_00: I have a responsibility myself to do the best that I can and throw myself onto
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  SPEAKER_00: the love and mercy of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if I do that, I do not have to be afraid.
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  SPEAKER_00: I tell people this all the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: No one goes to hell by accident.
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  SPEAKER_00: You don't go to hell by accident.
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  SPEAKER_00: You didn't trip over some trip wire.
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  SPEAKER_00: And oh my gosh, no, you know, no, no.
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  SPEAKER_00: If anyone is there, it's because they chose that, like this guy in the wedding feast.
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  SPEAKER_00: So he chooses to come in and he chooses not to have a wedding garment.
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  SPEAKER_00: He chooses the consequences.
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  SPEAKER_00: Those are the consequences, but you chose that.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm not throwing anyone out.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not the way our loving father works.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think we can see that in some sense, hell certainly does exist.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we can see that played out in the Holy Land during this last week.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we can see what happens when people choose against love,
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  SPEAKER_00: when they choose hatred, when they choose violence.
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  SPEAKER_00: They make hell on earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is well within all of our possibilities.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not our job to know anything really about what happens in the hereafter.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: But in the here and now,
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  SPEAKER_00: We have a responsibility to do the best we can to make this place better,
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  SPEAKER_00: to make this place not a hell on earth, but a heaven on earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's up to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's up to us how we are going to live and whether we are going to live out of love.
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  SPEAKER_00: If we live out of love, we do not have to be afraid.
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  SPEAKER_00: Love drives out fear.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to be afraid that we're ultimately going to make it.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can trust in our loving Father, but we can do more than that.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can help those around us.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can make this place better.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can communicate God's love to those people who have been placed in our lives.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is our great mission and call as Christians.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because we believe that there's something good after,
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  SPEAKER_00: that there's something worth living for,
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  SPEAKER_00: we can take that hope and that faith and that belief and make it concrete
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  SPEAKER_00: and share it with those around us.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is what we can do.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is the point of all of this talk.
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  SPEAKER_00: We should not live our lives focused on hell or on,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, was this a sin or was this not a sin?
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  SPEAKER_00: If I'm doing that, I'm focused on the wrong things.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'd have been focused on Jesus Christ and focused on love.
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  SPEAKER_00: If I encounter Jesus Christ,
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  SPEAKER_00: if I'm living out of love,
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  SPEAKER_00: then my life will improve and I'm not going to be harming other people
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  SPEAKER_00: and my life's going to sort of,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, find an order if that is what I am focused on.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let us let that sink in.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: These are always difficult topics to talk about and to think about.
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, we have to know.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's not our job to judge.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not our job to stand in judgment.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's our job to be everything that we can be,
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  SPEAKER_00: to live out of love,
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  SPEAKER_00: and to let the love of our lives communicate to those around us the face of God.