Take Heart: Christ is King #LectioCast

Explicit content warning

11/14/16 • 38 min

Christ is king. That’s the week on the liturgical calendar, it’s the promise of God. And it’s our hope in a time when we have figured out that our earthly shepherds are not going to fulfill God’s visions of justice and righteousness.

Jeremiah 23:1-6 God will shepherd God’s people. God will raise up a faithful shepherd to do it through. And God will see to it that humanity gets to flourish, free from fear, as God created us to do.

Luke 1:68-79 Zechariah prophesies over the ministry of John and anticipates the work of Jesus. It’s a vision of grand, earthy salvation, realized in the forgiveness of sins. God’s promise to work through a human king is coming to pass.

Colossians 1:11-20 Forgiveness leads to a kingdom in which Christ is king. Christ is king as humanity was supposed to be at the beginning: God’s image-bearing rulers of the earth. And God’s reconciling work bursts beyond the boundaries of God’s people to include the entire cosmos. This happens on the cross.

Luke 23:33-43 The shocking culmination of Reign of Christ week: we end with Jesus on the cross. But here, paradoxically, we discover the salvation that Jesus brings as king and messiah.

Daniel Kirk is a writer, speaker, and blogger who lives in San Francisco, CA where he is currently Pastoral
Director for the Newbigin House of Studies. His third book A Man Attested by God: the Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, is hot off the presses. Daniel holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from Duke University and is the author of, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God and Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? He blogs regularly at StoriedTheology.com (http://patheos.com/blogs/storiedtheology). You can follow him on Twitter @jrdkirk and on Facebook at Facebook.com/jrdkirk.

Luke 23:33-43 The shocking culmination of Reign of Christ week: we end with Jesus on the cross. But here, paradoxically, we discover the salvation that Jesus brings as king and messiah.

Previous Episode

A Glorious New Creation! After Things Get Really, Really Bad #LectioCast

The promise of new creation bursts through with images of wholeness, shalom, restoration, and God’s relentless passion for God’s beloved people. And when a bystander tries to get Jesus to say that the time has finally come for it, Jesus says, “Actually, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.”

Isaiah 65:17-25 New creation looks like a holistic picture of human thriving and flourishing. It’s shalom. It’s the dignity of meaningful work. It’s God delighting in each of us.

Isaiah 12 We celebrate a God whose identity is tied to our own. We celebrate a God who only “is” in relation to us, who “becomes” in relationship to the doings God promised to do.

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 Get to work. That is all.

Luke 21:5-19 No, that new creation thing isn’t on the cusp of happening. In fact, things have to get a whole lot worse, first. But take courage–God can save your whole self even if you lose your life.

Daniel Kirk is a writer, speaker, and blogger who lives in San Francisco, CA where he is currently Pastoral Director for the Newbigin House of Studies. His third book A Man Attested by God: the Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, is hot off the presses. Daniel holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from Duke University and is the author of, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God and Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? He blogs regularly at StoriedTheology.com (http://patheos.com/blogs/storiedtheology). You can follow him on Twitter @jrdkirk and on Facebook at Facebook.com/jrdkirk.

Next Episode

Advent: Waiting for the Messiah with Jason Micheli #LectioCast

The waiting game begins again. But we’re not waiting for the Messiah to be born. We’re waiting for him to reappear. We’re looking and longing for the new creation that was promised with the reign of God’s faithful servant. And so we watch for an hour whose coming we cannot anticipate. And so we become the future for which we hope.

Isaiah 2:1-5. When God exalts God’s people, the economy of the world is transformed. The military industrial complex surrenders to the agricultural economy of life-giving work. This word goes out and the peoples come in.

Psalm 122 Celebrating God’s presence as: a place, a place where righteous judgment is administered, a place where our sisters and brothers dwell, a place where my “neighbor” is anyone in need of mercy.

Romans 13:11-14 Waiting looks like becoming in Christ who we already are in Christ. The light looks like Jesus.

Matthew 24:36-44 The surprise of the Son of Man’s arrival takes everyone by storm. But might this simply be an iteration of the ministry of Jesus itself? Jason offers a fascinating interpretation.

Jason’s book: Cancer is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo

Jason Micheli is a United Methodist pastor in Northern Virginia. He claims that his years in the academy have done him not a whole world of good, claiming, “I’m now the least well-rounded person in the world, having studied theology at UVA and from Princeton. Seriously, I’ve got no skills apart from parsing Greek nouns and obscure theological categories.” You can find his writing at tamedcynic.com and his book, Cancer is Funny, on Amazon.

Daniel Kirk is a writer, speaker, and blogger who lives in San Francisco, CA where he is currently Pastoral Director for the Newbigin House of Studies. His third book A Man Attested by God: the Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, is hot off the presses. Daniel holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from Duke University and is the author of, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God and Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? He blogs regularly at StoriedTheology.com (http://patheos.com/blogs/storiedtheology). You can follow him on Twitter @jrdkirk and on Facebook at Facebook.com/jrdkirk.