"The church prays for the church —otherwise who would pray for her?" Sasse

Even as the Church is at the same time both subject and object of faith—the paradox of that article of faith concerning the one catholic and apostolic church consists in the fact that the church and she alone believes in the church—in like manner the church is at the same time both subject and object of prayer. The church prays for the church —otherwise who would pray for her?

It is worth while to consider the ancient prayers of the church for the church. In the prayer at the breaking of the bread in the Didache (9, 4) we hear: “As this bread that we break was scattered upon the mountains and gathered together to become one, so let Thy church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom.” Added to this petition for the unity of the church at her perfect consummation there is in the prayer that follows it a petition for the purification and unification of the church: “Remember, O Lord, Thy church, to deliver her from all evil and to perfect her in Thy love; and gather her together from the four winds, sanctified for Thy kingdom, which Thou didst prepare for her” (op. cit. 10, 5). These glorious prayers were then taken over by the later church and expanded, especially in connection with the Lord’s Supper. For instance, even Luther, following the example of Chrysostom, gladly used in his sermons on the Lord’s Supper the symbolism of the many kernels of grain, which make up one loaf, and of the many individual grapes which become wine, in order to illustrate the nature of the Lord’s Supper as the sacramentum unitatis.

But besides these illustrations of the Didache we find also other instances of the church’s own prayer for the church. In the same liturgy of the Coptic Jacobites which we just mentioned, we hear: “Pray for the peace of the one, holy catholic and orthodox church of God” (Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and Western I, 160). Almost all oriental liturgies offer parallels to this. Above all, what was prayed for ever and again, also in the Roman liturgy, was the unity and the peace of the church; even as the orthodox church also prayed for protection from her enemies. And if heretics are mentioned, as in the Roman Good Friday prayers, then it is the conversion of the heretics and schismatics that is the burden of the prayers. But prayer for the church always belongs to the nature of these churchly prayers of intercession. And besides the peace and unity of the church, the duration of the holy church is often the content of prayer, as for instance, in the so-called Prayer of Chrysostom, which, by the way, has also been taken over into evangelical liturgies.

What does this prayer of the church for herself mean? Is it a sacro egoismo, a more or less obvious clericalism that is expressed in this prayer? By no means. It is the deep conviction that the church is not what she should be. It is the conviction that she lives by the boundless mercy of her Lord and that without this forgiving mercy she is lost. So it is certainly not a clericalism or a false ecclesiastical cocksureness. What really prompts this prayer is a great feeling of uncertainty, of continual danger threatening the church, from without to be sure, but also from within.

If the church before the Reformation was in any point evangelical, then it was evangelical here. And one can certainly ask the question, whether the pre-Reformation church was not at least at this point more reformatory than the so-called churches of the Reformation. At any rate, intercessory prayer by the church for the church belongs to the essence of true evangelical divine worship. And we are speaking not of intercessory prayer, which has become empty form only, but of prayer which is spoken with all the fervor of the ecclesia orans in view of the admonitions and threats to the congregations in Revelation 2 and 3. For there it certainly is taken for granted that whole churches can die, even though they are outwardly at least still churches of Christ and, to all outward appearances at least, show signs of significant life.

Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors 5, Ecclesia Orans.