Tag Archives: Jesus

Ep25 Tour of Hell

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:27 — 23.3MB)

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Father Len takes us on a tour of hell exploring its origin and history providing glimpses of heaven along the way.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Hell can be hot and cold.
  • Hell is complete separation from God.
  • Heaven is complete union with God.
  • God is the source of life, love, community, justice, and compassion.
  • Hell is being separated from life, love, and community.
  • God offers life and love to all people as a free gift, but that doesn’t mean all people accept the gift.
  • Hell is often associated with fire, but in the Bible it is also depicted as a cold and lonely place.
  • The image of fire is also connected to heaven in the Bible.
  • Could it be that the fire of heaven and hell is the same, the fire of God’s love?
  • Life is a matter of preparing to live in the fire of God’s love or forever rejecting it.
  • If you live your life with hatred and selfishness, maybe pure love is something that you can’t stand.
  • People can create their own hell right here on earth. It’s not just an imaginary place where we might end up.
  • You separate yourself from God when you fail to live a life of love.
  • God wants everybody united in heaven, but that doesn’t mean everybody will be in heaven.
  • “The gates of hell are locked from the inside” – CS Lewis
  • Hell is something we create by our own choices, not something created by God.
  • God permits those who reject community, justice, compassion, and love, which is God, to live in the hell they create.
  • The images of heaven and hell help point our lives in the right direction.
  • Hell is a choice of selfishness and cruelty over love.
  • The gates of heaven are always open for those who love.

Ep20 Good and Evil Are Hard to Define and Fully Understand

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:48 — 21.8MB)

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Father Len explains why defining and fully understanding good and evil is pretty much beyond our ability as humans.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • The only wise reaction to evil is faith in God.
  • The mystery of what seems like evil to us may actually be something used by God for our good.
  • Father Len explains why we shouldn’t settle for cheap and easy answers for why evil and suffering exist in the world and instead humbly ask questions and more questions.
  • We will not understand evil until we can have the same perspective as God.
  • There might not be answers about good and evil that we can see and understand until we get to heaven and can look back in time.
  • Real wisdom is acquired through intimate experience with suffering.
  • What we proclaim as good may actually be bad for us.
  • What we proclaim as evil may actually be good for us.

Ep17 Race, Culture, and Jesus

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:22 — 15.9MB)

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Father Len reveals why Jesus came into the world as a Jew and why God created multiple races and cultures.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • God chose an enslaved, weak, and hated people to show God’s strength and bring love into the world.
  • Father Len reveals his joke about every Jewish feast.
  • The Bible constantly wrestles with racism.
  • There is just one race in the Bible. That’s humanity. There are many different nations, but they’re all part of one family.
  • Humanity is united by the language of love not rules, regulations, politics and technology.
  • Father Len tells his favorite racism story where God’s punishment for a Middle Eastern woman’s racism is to make her skin white as snow.
  • The Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, has made dozens of appearances around the world over time. Always appearing as a person of the nation in which she appears. This to signify that Christ is present in all of us no matter what the color of our skin or our country of origin.
  • If Jesus came into the world today he might well have black skin and be of African descent.

Ep9 What is the Bible and why does it matter?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:06 — 17.5MB)

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Father Len explains what the Bible is, where it came from, why it matters and how to use it.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • The Bible is a collection of books of sacred stories that span thousands of years.
  • The Bible is not a rule book. There are rules in the Bible, but they only make sense in the context of the stories in which they are contained.
  • The stories in the Bible give meaning to why we’re here and help us understand the purpose of our lives.
  • Bible stories are stories of a community written by a community explaining sacred reality from many viewpoints, different viewpoints, and even opposing viewpoints.
    • The wisdom contained in the “Book of Proverbs” is innocent and sweet like a young teenage girl.
    • The “Book of Ecclesiastes” critiques everything in the “Book of Proverbs.” Imagine a 40-year-old guy with a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of whiskey in the other sitting down to share his perspective on life with the innocent and sweet teenage girl.
  • The Bible tests our ideas about life and reveals truth from many different angles. It offers the wisdom of generations and generations.
  • Wisdom grows over time. Wisdom at one part of your life may not work at another. Your truth at age 18 might be true, but it’s a limited truth. Your truth at 50 is another type of truth and it might be true. When you get to 90, you’ll see the world much differently than you did at 18 or 50.
  • The Bible uses many genres to reveal truth. It contains large amounts of poetry, historical facts, myths, and fiction. All are sacred stories.
  • The Bible is inspired by God and directed by God, but written by human beings for human beings.
  • The Bible should be used as stories. Complete stories. Isolating and quoting individual chapters and verses from Bible stories can be problematic. Even though the words are correct, their meaning can easily be misunderstood or misinterpreted when removed from the context of the overall story and its meaning.
  • The Bible disagrees with itself at certain points, and it’s meant to, because then you have to change your thinking.
  • If you’re going to study the Bible, read it regularly in a community with a community’s perspective. Read it slow. Let it challenge you.