Acts 2:1-21, John 14:8-17, 25-27
I’m going to let you in on a little secret…. Every Pentecost Sunday, at least one person walks up to me just before church begins, brow furrowed with concern. This person is often one of the readers for today and are looking down at their bulletin, mouthing out words: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, and Pamphilia. How am I supposed to say these words? The secret … is simple. If you say it with confidence, no one will know the difference…

John 5:1-9
Javier reflects on the Gospel reading, where Jesus heals a man who has been an invalid for 38 years.

Luke 24:1-12
Javier discusses his visit to Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher and the feeling of being perplexed that Jesus’ message is sometimes not what we expect.

Philippians 3:4b-14
In 2009, a young musician stood before the cream of the crop of the political establishment and announced he was working on a concept album. An album, he noted, of someone whose life embodied hip-hop, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. That artist, of course was, Lin-Manuel Miranda, then only 29 years old. And the vennue was the White House during one of President Obama’s first famous poetry jams.

The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista reflects on Luke 9:28-36 (The Transfiguration): “What we call productivity is in reality the noise we make to prove to people that we are worthwhile… I hope that we will make room for being, just being, in a culture obsessed with busyness. I hope that—come what may—Christ may visit us on a lone mountain top and that he may walk down with us, wherever the road may lead.”

The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista discusses Luke 5:1-11, where Simon, James, and John become “fishers of men.”

(Luke 3:15-17, 21-22) A young girl named Joanne got her first job at the tender age of nine. She and her sister cleaned a little Anglican church down the street from their home in England. … She was baptised on July 31, 1976, her eleventh birthday, sprinkled at the font of St. Luke’s Church. She would go on the share her birthday with the main character of a book she would later write. Joanne Rowling, better known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, gave birth to the boy who lived, Harry Potter….

The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista discusses Luke 1:39-45(46-55) and the power of words: “It is into this world, full of hurtful, painful, broken words, that the Word made flesh decided to enter one fateful day long ago. And it is this world, full of our pain and our loss, that the Word made flesh is preparing to enter even now.”

The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista considers what it means to find hope in the apocalypse (Mark 13:1-8): “One of the most popular stops in Israel is a fortress named Masada. It is high up on the Judean desert, overlooking the Dead Sea. In the first century BC, Herod the Great built himself a palace there on a mesa, fortified its walls and made it nearly impenetrable. And yet for all its fortification, its vast food store houses, its complex aqueduct system and ingenious engineering, it is the location of a major defeat, the last stand of a host of Jewish rebels, finally fed up with imperial Roman rule.”

The Rev. Javier Almendárez-Bautista reflects on Mark 10:35-45: “The way of Christ is not simply a matter of getting into an exclusive club. It is a matter of servant leadership and sacrifice, a matter of commitment in the thick of resistance.”