Grace and peace to you all this week

Some of you have asked about the short poem on gratitude that I read towards the end of the sermon on Sunday. It is by one of my favorite contemporary writers of prayers – Justin McRoberts. Justin’s prayers are all the things a written prayer should be: memorable, punchy, and short. The heart of his prayers are never buried in words. 

Brevity in prayer is key. I think some of us – especially us preachers – often forget Jesus’ advice about prayer from the Sermon on the Mount: “When you pray do not keep on babbling like the unfaithful, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”

Anyway, here is the prayer/poem from Sunday in print.

     Thankfulness

     Is the key to every gift

     If I do not have thankfulness,

     I don’t receive anything,

     Regardless of

     How much I’m given

Gratitude is the capstone of every gift. Without thankfulness, the act of giving a gift remains incomplete. In the same way, without our joyful response to God’s grace, without our faithful gratitude to Christ, the many gifts we have received remain incomplete. This reminds of another section from the Sermon on the Mount: What good does it do for a person to gain the whole world and yet forfeit their soul? What can a person give in return for their soul?

Let us thank God that He has returned our souls to us, washed clean from sin, newly inflated with hope, and able to persevere in all things.

—————

I’m going to put one of my copies of Justin McRobert’s books in the library today in case any of you are interested. You should know that there are several new books in the library. Many of them are gifts from Alan Foster who donated his impressive library to the church. I will recommend in particular a couple of them:

Tish Harrison Warren is an Anglican priest whose book on prayer through difficult times, Prayer In The Night, won Book of the Year for Christianity Today in 2022. I highly recommend it for its willingness to embrace both the hope we have as Christians and the reality that we will face opposition and struggle in our life.

Winn Collier’s biography of Eugene Peterson, A Burning In My Bones, is incredibly readable and of local interest. The poet, pastor and translator lived and worked along Flathead Lake and, for those of you who don’t know, his brother Ken pastored FPC for many years. 

Tom Wright is probably the most respected academic authority on Paul and his letters in the world. And yet he also writes with the heart of a pastor with great imagination and practicality. He’s even got a slightly smug British accent. All that to say, he is as close to an heir to C.S. Lewis as we are going to find. His book on Christian discipleship is a great introduction to Paul and the New Testament and why it matters for the Christian life today. (If you’d rather listen to him speak, one of his talks at Fuller Seminary on this topic is available on Youtube: N. T. Wright on Discipleship and the Future of the Church.)

——–

Finally please do not forget about the Taylor Leonhardt concert here at FPC on August 13 at 7:00 pm. Leonhardt is a Nashville songwriter and worship leader who has agreed to join while traveling through Montana with a fly reel and her dog Luna. I’ve heard her perform a couple of times, most recently to over a thousand people performing songs based on the work of Eugene Peterson. We are lucky to have her at our small church in our small town. I hope you will come and bring friends.

May the God of peace bless you in every way this week