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.”