Sermon archive for category: Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista

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.”