Responses to Plague Prayers

I appreciate all of your feedback on my questions regarding the prayers in times of plague from previous prayer books. I apologize for not being able to reply to each of you specifically, but instead, I would like to summarize some of the feedback I got and give my own reflections.

First, many of you, I think rightly, highlight the lack of a prayer for such a season in a modern prayer book as evidence of modern pride and forgetfulness of God. While the discovery of penicillin, modern vaccines, and methods for treating many ailments are good gifts from God, we are right to recognize that they can become too much like gods in our thinking. This leads me to the second thrust of responses, which was a general appreciation for the 1928 prayer, because it took God’s sovereignty seriously while also offering prayers for doctors, medications, and treatments.

Finally, most of us were really uncomfortable with the prayer from 1662, which takes the theme of judgment far more seriously than we are used to as modern Christians. John Laffoon, our youth minister, had a great response to this line of thinking that I cannot improve upon. He says, “In order for the 1662 prayer to be used wisely, good teaching should accompany it. Otherwise, parishioners might conclude that any current ‘plague’ is certainly God’s divine retributive judgment. However, the prayer is not explicitly teaching or implying that. The prayer’s main foci are on God’s sovereignty and his mercy. In his sovereignty and perfect justice, he can both send and remove ‘plagues.’ However, as Scripture repeats over and over, he is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’ (Ps 103:8). Job and Jesus taught that mankind usually cannot know the reason or cause for every tragedy in this fallen world (Job 42:3, Luke 13:1-4). The plagues mentioned in the prayer were also not the norm, but exceptional miraculous acts of judgment. They came with warning and clear revelation of purpose, unlike Covid-19, the Spanish Flu, Smallpox, the Black Plague, etc. So even if Covid-19 were God’s retributive judgment (beyond the fallen state of the world), how would we know without clear revelation? God’s clearest revelation to us is found in his written Word (Scripture) and his incarnate Word (Jesus).” I agree completely with John’s teaching on the prayer and would add that we need to remember that the God of the Old Testament is the same God we know and worship in Christ Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit.

On the other hand, a wise Priest and friend of mine is encouraging his Parish to be very open to the possibility that God is, in some sense, using Covid as a means to, mercifully, judge a Church that has undoubtedly gone astray. I am inclined to agree with him, with the caveats provided by John. The very fact that the church in this season is denied her spiritual food and fellowship, on Easter no less, could be interpreted as signs that God is refining the Church of its impurities. Yet, we can not place our own musings and interpretations of what is going on above the authority of God’s Word in Scripture and in Christ.

I thank God for all of you in this Easter season. Easter Sunday was a strange, difficult day, with some reminders of God’s mercy and grace, but also with a great deal of sadness. I hope to never have another Easter like it again.

Yours in Christ,

Fr. Matt