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A Prayer for the Time of Pandemic

News--Prayer

God said to his people, exiled from their homeland in Babylon, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” (Jeremiah 29:7)

The Rev. Marc Boutan prayed these words in the conclusion to his May 17 sermon:

Father, we thank you for making it possible for us to have a relationship with you, the Living God. Thank you that you are with us: you walk beside us and even carry us through the tough times, for you will not forsake us. Most of all, we thank you for sharing your life so intimately with us, that we are united to you as branches to the true Vine. We want to exercise that relationship and to be fruitful and let your blessing flow through us into our world. So we pray, Lord, for this broken world. We acknowledge that we are lost without you. We know that apart from you, we can do nothing. We ask you to save us, and so we ask you to destroy and remove the coronavirus from our world. We pray for your protection around each person and for healing of those infected. We pray for no subsequent waves of infection to come.

We pray for our nation to open safely and ask for a vigorous restart of our economy, and we pray for jobs to reopen for all people, for successful reemployment. We ask for your help for every situation of financial hardship. We pray that this pandemic will not result in a recession. We pray that you will give President Trump and his advisors, all people with political influence, wisdom to help us resume normal life, that we might be able to come close to each other again. We pray for wisdom for our bishop and for Jeff, our rector, in restarting our church community life.

We pray for healing of our political divisions. Use this crisis to call people to put their trust in you. Teach us the lessons we need to learn from this quarantine experience. We entrust ourselves to you, and we look to you, Father, to bring fruit from our prayers. We ask in the Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.