Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

What a pilgrimage is this Lenten journey that we are on! We began on Ash Wednesday with the realization that we have missed the mark as God’s creatures. We have become entirely self-referential. We are so turned in on ourselves that we no longer can find ourselves in the face of our neighbor. We cannot see our neighbor because of our desperate attempts to find ourselves. God was dismissed from the world long ago and not just recently as some suppose.

How does God get our attention? It is in the most direct and hard way. God says to our first parents and now to us, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” This is a strange prediction to put forth to people who are already troubled by our status in the world. But there is a peculiar comfort in the words, and I submit to you this morning it is because these words are not just descriptive of our situation. They do not leave us in the prison that we call death. These words also promise us.

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” promises us that our creature status is not a curse. It only becomes a curse when we try to use our limited strength to break out of the finite mold in which we were created. We try to find within ourselves the strength break out of the mortal bands that tie us close to this good creation. We belong to the soil. We are human only because we come from humus. “We are dust and to dust we shall return,” is a promise that we will not escape the human frame which comprehends us.

To the mind that is only willing to think the things of human beings, acceptance of these words is like being in prison. But to those who have learned to think the things of God, the words promise that our life is from beginning to end a gift. A gift has to have a giver, and we have come to know who the giver is through the witness of Israel and ultimately, through the testimony of Jesus Christ.

The gift of death gives us then the choice to see life in relationship to the giver of life, to our neighbor, and to all of creation. That relationship is characterized by promise. Israel came to know herself as a creation people. Just as creation had been spoken into existence by the mouth of God and brought forth out of nothing, so too Israel began to understand her origin as having been “no people” who were then called to be God’s people.

There are several stories of the origin of Israel. Written into the Hebrew witness to the mysterious power of God is the story of the promising God. We hear its power today in the account of God’s promise to Abraham and to Sarah. Israel is conceived in the act of a promise enacted by God. Israel does not yet exist except in the “mystic breath of God.” The promise is so reiterated as to leave no doubt that the foundation of Israel’s existence is the promise.

You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. (Genesis 17:4-7)

God brings Israel into existence by calling a ragtag group of slaves to a vocation of witnessing to the God who promises blessing to the nations. As Paul explains in his letter to the Roman Christians, Israel—like creation itself—had been called into existence out of nothing. The prophets would declare later, “Once you were no people. Now you are my people.”

Both the books, Genesis and Romans, emphasize the promissory nature of our existence as God’s creatures. God makes promises with Noah and with Abraham and Sarah. The promise is not made upon condition that Noah or Abraham or Sarah fulfill some prior condition. God speaks and the promise is made unconditionally. This means that the promise of life is in God’s realm. “The ball is always in God’s court.” That is why we read the Bible with an eye to the promise of God.

God’s story is the story of God’s kingdom. It is the promise of God’s rule, but not by threat, violence, or force. We corrupt the meaning of death by making it an evil instrument by which we try to usurp God’s rule and exploit creation and our neighbor. But God continues to remind us that life is founded on the Word of God which comes to us as an unconditional promise.

Dear congregation, we have today the opportunity to hear the promise of God right where the church has always heard it. The promise comes to us in Jesus’s own words to his disciples. This Jesus is tempted like all of us to abandon the promise of God, especially when he is threatened by death.

The kingdom that Jesus proclaims is actually a threat to the kingdom of death in which all the players in this story have a role.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. (Mark 8:31-32a)

Even Peter plays the role of Satan when he hears Jesus’ prediction of rejection, suffering, death and resurrection. Peter apparently has no place for these things in the life of a messiah. Peter rebukes Jesus. But Jesus rebukes Peter for his lack of understanding.

The prediction of Jesus that he will not evade suffering and death includes the firm trust that the God who promises blessing will bring out of our suffering the restoration of all things. The promise of resurrection is the powerful expectation that God will vindicate those who have remained faithful to God. That means that Jesus will suffer the insults and pain of this world. For this reason we will speak of the passion of Jesus. He is not only passive to the misery of human cruelty. In other words he suffers rejection and death. Jesus is also passive to the unconditional promise of God to bring about life. He is raised by God from the dead.

We now have the promise of God displayed, but not in the successful evasion of suffering. The cross and resurrection become the sign of God’s own presence in our human condition. That is why we can speak of hope in our own situation, and we can pick up our own cross which is nothing other than faith in and loyalty to the God of Jesus Christ. Such a God is revealed as faithful to the divine promise to bring life even to us who are dying. But those baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus will live.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.