If you prayed this prayer before bedtime as a child, or perhaps even still do now — with your own children or maybe all alone with your own inner child, chime right in:

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I have a feeling most of us stumbled on that phrase, “If I should die before I wake.” It was always a rather troubling and confusing thought: the notion of waking up dead. As a child, I used to wonder how that all worked. “Well, I’ll wake up, but I guess when I do I’ll be dead.” As I got a little older, the whole concept got a little scarier. “What if I don’t wake up?” “What if I really do die before waking up? … I guess I better finish the prayer!”

Dying. It’s something we try a lifetime to avoid. Some of us get to try longer than others, but inevitably nobody misses their chance. As a former pastor of mine used to say, “None of us gets out of here alive.”

Peter was not happy about Jesus’ teaching on death and dying in this morning’s gospel text. But he must have been feeling awfully proud of himself for answering Jesus’ probing question with the specificity and particularity that he perhaps hoped Jesus was looking for. “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus had asked the disciples, but only after having asked, “What’s the word on the street, what’s the buzz out there about me, who are people saying that I am?” The answers he’d gotten had been rather ghostly, rather other–worldly and mystical. In every instance, the disciples reported that the buzz about Jesus was that he was someone who had died and come back to life: the erstwhile–beheaded John the Baptist, the prophet Elijah who had been wisked away in a chariot of fire, or one of any of Israel’s many prophets who had met an untimely death. Indeed, there was all sorts of spooky conjecture going on amongst the people about who Jesus was. But then Jesus pointed the question to the twelve and asked them, “But what about you: who do you say that I am?”

Peter, being Peter, answered first and with great conviction, like every good teacher’s pet who figures they have the answer the teacher wants to hear: “You are the Messiah,” he says, expecting some sort of pat–on–the–head from his rabbi. But instead, Jesus gives him strict instructions — stern orders — not to utter a word to anyone about him.

We’re right back to where we were last week’s gospel, in which Jesus, right after having learned his lesson on ephphatha — being open — from the Syrophoenician woman, healed a deaf man with a speech impediment. And the minute he healed the man, Jesus told him and everyone who had witnessed it not to tell anyone. But you see, Jesus knew the people were getting the wrong idea about him. He wasn’t only about healing and exorcising demons and feeding 5,000 people a big happy meal. He was destined to die.

Likewise Peter, for all his correctness in answering Jesus’ question, has the right title but the wrong understanding. In other words, Peter’s expectations of the title “Messiah” and how Jesus is destined to live into that word are two different things. So Jesus sternly orders Peter to keep his mouth closed, because Jesus is not Peter’s brand of Messiah. Rather than being Israel’s conqueror over Roman oppression and domination, Jesus understands the real implications of his identity and begins to speak quite openly with the twelve about what is in store for him.

And what is in store for him is not in Peter’s definition of Messiah. Jesus teaches the twelve that he must undergo great suffering, rejection by the establishment, death, and yes, resurrection. But Peter will have none of it and tries to dissuade Jesus’ from continuing down this road of self–identity.

St. Mark’s phrase strikes me in verse 32: “He (that is, Jesus) said all this quite openly.” We are one full chapter further into the gospel of Mark this week from last, and the ephphatha openness Jesus learned from the Syrophoenician woman he practices yet again in terms of his calling and his destiny. Even as Jesus came to embrace that Gentile woman whom he had rudely called a dog, even now Jesus embraces his unique messianic path, his own suffering and death because of his openness not only to the people of Israel but also to the Gentiles. But in stark contrast to that openness, Peter’s rebuke of Jesus being that kind of Messiah is not done openly, but rather Peter privately takes Jesus aside and challenges such openness: such openness to an identity that would lead to inevitable suffering and death.

Jesus then launches into an extremely hard teaching on the implications of being his follower: that is, dying and rising. The text doesn’t tell us how Peter responded, only that Jesus began the teaching right he referred to Peter as Satan. Knowing our own response to these difficult words, however, we can only imagine Peter’s. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me,” Jesus says. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” It sounds like a death wish, frankly. But for those who will follow, Jesus promises that beyond the cross is an empty tomb, beyond suffering there is redemption, and beyond death there is life. But truth be told, we don’t like crosses, suffering, or death.

This past week I took a little stroll through Woodlawn Cemetery here in Santa Monica. Even though it’s still officially summer until a week from Tuesday, since it’s post — Labor Day it sort of somewhat feels like fall, and in the fall — for some reason — I like to seek out a cemetery for a reflective stroll. I don’t know: call it touching base with my mortality. Communing with the saints. Having a laugh with the sinners. (They’re all the same anyway…) While walking amongst the headstones, I found the grave of our dear St Paul’s matriarch Gertrude “Gertie” Miles, and her husband Earl. But somehow when we buried Gertie last summer, I had missed the phrase that is etched in gravestone below their names and dates of birth and death. It reads simply “Only Forever.” Knowing Gertie, I figured it was probably from a song and sure enough, I discovered when I got home that it was made famous by Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby and held #1 on the Billboard chart from October to December in 1940, back when Gertie was singing with a small dance orchestra back in Pennsylvania. A sweet and playful love song in its day, its words of invitation mirror the love of God in Jesus which summon us to follow and then promise to follow us until our dying day:

Do I want to be with you
As the years come and go?
Only forever
If you care to know.
Would I grant all your wishes
And be proud of the task
Only forever
If someone should ask.
How long would it take me
To be near if you beckon?
Off hand I would figure
Less than a second.
Do you think I’ll remember
How you looked when you smile?
Only forever
That’s puttin’ it mild.
(written by: James V. Monaco and Johnny Burke)

Sisters and brothers, if we should die before we wake tomorrow morning, we will find that the one who calls us to take up our cross and follow will meet us as we awaken in that place beyond suffering, beyond sickness, pain and sadness, that place beyond the cross of this world, and will say to us “Only forever.”

But if by God’s grace we should live some more before we die, the cross of Christ summons us to renounce the deathly ways in us that draw us from God, to renounce the deathly powers of this world that rebel against God, to take up our cross.

And if we should die before we live some more, we will have heard the gracious call of Christ to follow, and we will walk “only forever” in the presence of the Lord, in the land of the living.

Amen.