The Stone Lives #LectioCast

Explicit content warning

05/08/17 • 37 min

Jesus. This week is all about Jesus. Jesus reconfiguring the identity of the people of God. Jesus receiving God’s vindication in the face of humanity’s rejection of him. Jesus holding the identity that we get to share in: living stones, the one in whom the father is at work so that the father might be glorified.

Acts 7:55-60 Stephen relives the Jesus story: condemned as a blasphemer of the Temple, he raises the ire of the leadership by proclaiming Jesus as the son of man at God’s right hand. He entrusts his spirit to God even as he forgives his persecutors in the face of death. Jesus’s followers are little Christs.

Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 Shame is found in abandonment. Honor and exaltation are found in deliverance. The New Testament’s boldest move is to claim honor and exaltation for those who go to death in service of God.

1 Peter 2:2-10 Children who long for the milk that begot them, little Christs who are living stones like Jesus, priests who minister spiritual sacrifices that replace the Temple. A multi-faceted articulation of our identity as the people of God, with a little supersessionism thrown in for good measure.

John 14:1-14 Knowing Jesus is knowing God. And knowing Jesus is knowing the one and only way to God. And knowing Jesus being made into the likeness of Jesus and God so that God will be glorified by what we do. It’s all very confusing.

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.

Previous Episode

The Shepherd Wants Your Money #LectioCast

The resurrected Jesus is the shepherd of the sheep. And the community of the Good Shepherd is one where people radically reconfigure how they spend their money. Are we ready for that kind of discipleship? Are we ready to form those kinds of communities?

Acts 2:42-47 The message we most need to hear, the message we least want to heed: they had everything in common, they created a distinctive community, and everyone loved it.

Psalm 23 The Shepherding Lord: David’s, Jesus’s, and ours.

1 Peter 2:19-25 The cross of Christ tells us about God, and about us. It calls us to do right, no matter what the cost, trusting the God who judges justly. Oh, and that cross? We can think of what it does in about a hundred different ways.

John 10:1-10 The good shepherd makes sure the sheep are well tended. The declaration that he brings abundant life holds up a mirror to us, asking if we’ll actually believe that handing everything into his care will lead to the abundance of life we crave.

Next Episode

Jesus is Raised: So Walk in Loving Fear #LectioCast

Jesus has been raised. I think this means we don’t have to worry about crazy passages from 1 Peter.

Acts 17:22-31 Paul unravels the narrative of polytheism, claiming for one God a unique place of sovereignty and honor. And then he pulls in a Jesus juke at the end to call for repentance. Masterful.

Psalm 66:8-20 God gets a lot of credit here, maybe more than we’re comfortable ascribing to a loving deity: bringing us through nets and piling up burdens before finally delivering. But it works well as a story of Jesus. Try it on.

1 Peter 3:13-22 For the second time this week we have to dodge models for doing apologetics. Fortunately there are some good distractions: like stories of fallen angels going to prison and being taunted by Jesus, stories told to provoke confidence that God will be victorious over his people’s enemies.

John 14:15-21 Get ready to have your brain scrambled by a Jesus/Spirit/Father/follower mind-meld. And all of it is known and done through a Christological reorientation of what it looks like to be the people of God.