The Litany

From the crafts and assaults of the devil;
from sudden and evil death;
from pestilence and famine;
from war and bloodshed;
from sedition and rebellion;
from lightning and tempest;
from all calamity by fire and water;
and from everlasting death:
good Lord, deliver us.

That always struck me as an odd assortment of petitions. The paragraph groupings in the other sections of the litany seemed like more cohesive units to me. But after Sunday's gospel and sermon (the end of Matthew 6), and after several days of having my mind hijacked by "What God Ordains Is Always Good" and "All Depends on Our Possessing God's Abundant Grace and Blessing" and "In God, My Faithful God, I Trust When Dark My Road," I have a thought.

We do pray for protection from those temporal tribulations: death, famine, storms, war, etc. But those aren't the "biggies." What is even worse than these crises is how the devil can craftily use them to assault faith. "See, God doesn't care about you: your house burned down [or your nation was attacked by war-mongers, or hail destroyed your crops, or whatever]." So this list of harms to the body and threats to our possessions is book-ended by the first and last petitions which pray for deliverance from how these losses and sorrows could threaten faith. Because even if God permitted pestilence and famine, war and bloodshed, what ultimately matters is that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice. Although we are attacked by these things, we pray that we may finally overcome them, and win the victory.

I guess I could type out the words to the last stanza of "A Mighty Fortress" because they'd fit SO well, but I'm not going to right now. (I'm trying to write shorter posts. A futile endeavor, I'm sure....)