We don’t use it all that often. Ash Wednesday. Maybe the odd Sunday in Lent or Advent. The Litany (LSB 288) is a highly stylized and formal call and response prayer. Technically our “Prayers of the Church” are a litany. They are petitionary in that they ask God for something. There is a call and response form to them. The difference is that the call, the petition, is usually changeable and specific week to week, while the congregational response is fixed in one of two forms: “Hear our prayer” or “In you mercy.” The formal litany is contemplative in both call and response. The petitions are general: “from all sin, error and evil…deliver us good Lord.” As a contemplative prayer, we individually supply our sin, error and evil. And collectively we offer them up to Christ seeking deliverance. A litany in English has just become a synonym for an overly long list. But if that word was still grounded in the world of contemplative prayer, it is a list of things important enough to bring to Almighty God. It is a list of things common enough that we all fear the things in it. We don’t like to contemplate them, but we need to. And turn them over to Christ who alone grants us peace.
The line that plays on my memory today is one that I don’t think we tend to share with most Christians of most times and places as a trouble. “From sudden and evil death…good Lord deliver us.” Every time I intone that line, my contemplation is that I think most of us would prefer that, a sudden if not evil death. Don’t let me suffer or linger or be a burden. Let my death be fast and if not fast then easy. Our entire end of life system these days is built towards giving that. Although I am not sure if that is for the comfort of those remaining or of those leaving. But that petition was important enough for most Christians to make it into the litany. Sudden death for most of history was all around. Sudden death could be an evil death for multiple reasons, but primarily two. A sudden death might “capture us unawares.” Like the 5 virgins who fell asleep without oil, the day came, and they were not ready. The second thing a sudden death precluded was reconciliation. We tend to keep grudges, and if not grudges, there are all kinds of minor things, each a brick in a wall that builds up between us and our family or neighbor. And if not a full wall, a stumbling stone that makes interaction in anything but gentle pleasantries uncomfortable. The time before death was the time to clear away any of those hindrances. In our sufferings, to fill up the sufferings of Christ, and be reconciled to all. A sudden death would rob that.
Of course, I’m reflecting just on the fact of the sudden death of Dale and Marge. None of us knows our day, hour or minute. And neither of those two concerns were a problem with Dale or Marge. They were not caught unaware by the day. They both had a solid and fervent faith in Jesus. And in living out that faith I saw no evidence of stumbling blocks placed or walls that needed to come down. Dale and Marge lived the faith day by day. And in that they are examples of the saints we are to hold up for our instruction. We can pray that God would grant us the time to be in earnest, that sudden and evil death would not catch us, so that we might be reconciled at the last. Or we can recognize that now is that time. Today is the day of grace. Today is the day to strengthen our faith toward God and our fervent love toward one another. Today is the day to check the oil for our lamps.
