“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!” Psalm 51:1-2
For Christmas 2018, my Grandmother bought me a book entitled The Lutheran Prayer Companion. It is a book that is a collection of prayers from the mid-1800s that have been translated from German into English. It was to serve as a compliment to the St. Louis Hymnal, which is called Walther’s Hymnal in English. This prayer book was to be the most exhaustive Lutheran prayer book, and the prayer book to end all prayer books. As a result, it contains prayers for anything that you can think of.
When I opened this book, I began to thumb through it and to scan the contents. I flipped through the section on the Lord’s Prayer. I then moved on to the sections on “Vocation,” “The Catechism,” and then “Cross and Tribulation.” When I was looking through the section on “Cross and Tribulation,” a handful of prayers caught my eye. They were entitled “Prayers during a Pandemic.” I remember when I saw that saying to myself, “I’ll never use that! I feel bad for the guy who had to translate this. A pandemic won’t happen in my lifetime, in this country! What other topics are here?”
Never say “Never,” I guess. As I thought about this irony given our current circumstances, there are a few lines from one of the prayers that I thought was worth sharing. It says, “Where then shall we flee, and where shall we turn, that we may be safe from this other plagues and pandemics? To You alone, Lord Jesus Christ. We have no other comfort either in heaven or on earth except You, who have redeemed us. Surely You will not cast off Your creation; therefore we humbly call, sigh, and cry out to You with our whole heart, saying, ‘God be merciful unto us and blot out all our sins according to Your exceeding great grace, goodness, and mercy!’”
In times like this, we have no other place to go, and no one else to turn to. We can only turn to Jesus Christ. He is our only, true, and lasting comfort. Nothing in Heaven and Earth will do! As the prayer reminds us, He is our Redeemer, our Savior. He has delivered us from sin, death, and the power of the devil, and won’t leave us during this time. He will surely not cast off His creation, or leave it to suffer the fate it deserves. Instead, this faithfulness motivates us to pray, to call upon Him, to sigh (share our griefs, struggles, and disappointments), and to call out to Him for His mercy.
And what does God say? He says, “Yes,” in Jesus Christ. He grants us the mercy and grace we need to sustain us during this time. He will surely not cast off His creation….He died and rose for it! As we continue during this time, take heart in Your God Who will sustain and keep you in His loving grace and care.
In Christ,
Pastor Nick Kooi
(Originally published in Emmaus Footprints, Vol. XXI, Number 11, June 2020)