I wake up by myself every morning.
Even when I set alarms I wake up and turn them off.
Clocky and Tocky are alarm clocks that run off, so you wake up trying to catch them.
Obviously they’re useless for teenagers: they’d just spin around in all the rubbish.
And I refuse to believe people so tidy that these things would free-range around would have trouble waking up.
Anyway, I need to get to sleep.
The full title of the song is Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven (But Nobody Wants To Die).
It’s from an early 90’s album by Alison Krauss and The Cox Family called I Know Who Holds Tomorrow.
Will Willimon’s memoir Accidental Preacher is an engaging collection of memories and observations.
He tells the story, and the art of telling the story is as enjoyable as the stories themselves.
In writing about the somewhat neglected concept of calling, he makes the observation that being a disciple of Jesus is not our idea. We didn’t volunteer, we were called. And that stops our service being about ourselves and makes it about the one who idea our service originated from.
In a rare lapse into autobiography, Isaiah dates his call, “In the year that king Uzziah died,” leaving us to speculate why the death of the king was significant in the young prophet’s vocation. Methodists adore this passage. Our Methodist national anthem is based on Isaiah 6, Dan Shutte’s “Here I Am, Lord.” Few Methodists make it through two stanzas of this hymn without volunteering to go evangelize Zulus or at least to shed a maudlin tear.
Here I am, Lord, is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. … I will go, Lord, where you send me … I …
Note the prevalence of the first—person personal pronoun as vocation degenerates into volunteering. Rather than risky encounter with a summoning God, worship morphs into sappy songs, syrupy clichés on the screen, followed by the sharing of tiring details about our personal lives at the coffee hour. Christian preaching slides into “Come right over here and sit next to me. I’m dying to tell you all about myself,” and theology becomes commentary on human experience of God rather than God. Interiority writ large.
Here I am, Lord overlooks a great gift of vocation: rescue from our overly cultivated subjectivity. Vocation’s power, said Hermann Hesse, is when “the soul is awakened…, so that instead of dreams and presentiments from within a summons comes from without,” and an external relation “presents itself and makes its claim.”
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Vocation is not evoked by your bundle of need and desire. Vocation is what God wants from you whereby your life is transformed into a consequence of God’s redemption of the world.
Will Willimon, Accidental Preacher, Eerdmans, 2019, pgs 51-52, 54.
The business end of the season is actually the business end of the season in the AFL. If Brisbane can win at home against Geelong they’re a very good chance of coming first. If they lose they shouldn’t do worse than third. Games against Geelong and Richmond over the next two weeks should prepare them perfectly for finals.
In the NRL it looks as if Easts are finally waking up. Too late to stop Melbourne getting the minor premiership, but as Easts well know that trophy doesn’t really count for much. And Canberra just aren’t quite there yet.
NRL (last round 4/8; season tally 100/160)
Manly
Paramatta
Brisbane
Newcastle
Melbourne
Souths
Easts
Cronulla
AFL (last round 6/9; season tally 113/180)
Sydney
Carlton
Brisbane
Collingwood
Port Adelaide
Fremantle
West Coast
Greater Western Sydney
Hawthorn
