The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista reflects on 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 and the endurance of wisdom: “We are complicated people, and each day we are given choices. We require wisdom to do not just that which is convenient but that which is right. Will we seek after God’s wisdom?”
The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista reflects on John 6:1-21: “In Islam, the pilgrim or believer is often imagined as a bird with two wings: one of the wings is fear, one of the wings is fear. In order to make her journey through life, the believer must hold these two in tension.”
The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista considers Mark 6:1-13: “What kind of person is a prophet? Abraham Heschel had something to say about that… He describes a prophet as a person concerned with God’s involvement not just in the big events but in the particular circumstances of day-to-day existence.”
The Rev. Javier Almendárez Bautista discusses Paul’s radical message to a community in conflict (2 Corinthians 6:1-13): “The great hope of the Christian faith, the scandalous thing about it, the most daring thing it offers, is that the past does not have to determine our future. Our scandalous hope is that God will not judge us by our worst moment or by the popular opinion poll of our potential… Will we treat people according to society’s worst assumptions of who they are, or will we treat them exactly as we ourselves have been treated by God?”
The Rev. Javier Almendárez Bautista considers Nicodemus (John 3:1-17) and the work of Jean Vanier: “I wonder if in the moments where we each feel the ground shifting beneath our feet, when someone stands before us and challenges the way we think, feel, and act in the world, whether we could hear Jesus in their words, beckoning us forward, urging us again and again to be born anew. I wonder if we, like Nicodemus, could sit more often with the discomfort of not being the expert and truly listen to the Spirit’s movement among us.”
Javier reflects on John 17:6-19. “Years ago, during my first years of seminary, I took my first class in Greek, one of the languages you need to study in order to read ancient manuscripts of scripture. And it was my first fall in North Carolina, which felt an awful lot like summer in Seattle, so the idea of climbing down to a basement classroom to rehearse strange words and grammar and verb conjugations wasn’t exactly ideal.”
The Rev. Javier Almendárez Bautista offers three suggestions for a more peaceful common life (Luke 24:36b-48): “We all bear wounds, proclaiming a peace that we don’t always feel. So what might this peace mean for us today? I’d like to offer a few suggestions… 1) turn off your phone every once in a while, 2) go deeper into your own spiritual life, and 3) go out proclaiming that peace into a world that needs to hear it. It sounds so simple, but it maybe some of the most challenging work we could ever do.”
On Maundy Thursday, the Rev. Javier Almendárez Bautista reflects on John 13:1-17, 31b-35: “This moment feels like the eye of the storm. Jesus, the great teacher and wonderworker, stops for just a moment before the culminating act of his earthly ministry and simply shares a meal with his closest friends.”
On Palm Sunday, the Rev. Javier Almendárez Bautista discusses Mark 14:1-15:47 (The Passion): “It’s all too easy to draw abstract conclusions about the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion, all too tempting to simply see it as a God who desires punishment… but that is to miss the drama of the story, to miss the fact that before theologians tried to make sense of Jesus’s sacrifice, the disciples found it important to tell and retell and write down the story as they best remembered it.”
The Rev. Javier Almendárez Bautista discusses Genesis 9:8-17 and the story of Noah: “I wonder what it would look like for us to reimagine God back into the picture, to see God as one who is fully invested in the lives of God’s creatures, caring, grieving, remembering, to see God get down and work with us in the dirt, concerned with how our actions impact the world around us.”