Protestant Prayers For The Dead (Protestant Prayers For The Dead (Deceased Person))
Below are some Protestant prayers for the dead (deceased person):
Father of all, we pray to you for (name), and for all those whom we love but see no longer. Grant to them eternal rest. Let light perpetual shine upon them. May his soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Protestant Prayers for the Dead (2)
Lord, we find it difficult to accept the death of [name of the deceased] whom we love. You see us torn and slaughtered far more than we can express. We turn to you to tell you about our pain and our revolt. Do not leave us alone in the depths of our sadness. Amen.
Protestant Prayers for the Dead (3)
Lord,
We want to express our grief to you, even if we are not too used to talking or praying to you. We want to tell you about us and *** and what he means to us. We are looking for the face of the one we have lost.
He/she was with us, and we have lost that part of ourselves. He/she was smiling at us and we miss his smile. He/she loved life, and we miss he/she outlook on life.
Lord God, / We tell you how sorry we are for losing ***, a (husband, a father, a grandfather, a friend). Hear our hearts, receive our prayers, our silences, our questions.
We place them, simply in the palm of your hands.
Amen.
Protestant Prayers for the Dead (4)
God, we say thank you for the living who have crossed the earth from the dawn of time until now and who gave it its human mark. Thank you for the living, who crossed the earth and whose words of forgiveness, gestures of love, acts of courage, songs of hope and joy have come down to us and have enabled us to stand up in existence. Thank you for the living who have crossed the earth, enlightened by your Word and who have revealed to us the light of your face. Thank you for the living who have passed through our life by depositing tenderness in the course of our days. Without them our existence would have been a long, lonely, empty walk.
Thank you for their love, their presence and their gaze; they gave birth to us every day. Thank you for the hope you have rooted in us, thanks to Jesus, the Living One, your Son, ferryman of all nights and all the dead.
God, Father of tenderness and friend of men, on this day we remember *** in the confidence that his name is inscribed in the palm of your hand, and that he will never be erased from it. He has found his peace in your peace, and his fullness in his benevolence.
We entrust our lives to you, we entrust you especially *** and *** and their families. Amen.
Book of Common Prayers – Protestant Prayers for the Dead
The Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1552) contains seven texts known as funeral sentences; several composers wrote from these seven texts known as the funeral service. The principal Anglican requiem composers are Thomas Morley, Orlando Gibbons, and Henry Purcell.
The text of the seven sentences taken from the Book of Public Prayers:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord : he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shalt stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God : whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be the Name of the Lord.
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower ; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
In the midst of life we are in death : of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.
Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer ; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.
I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord : even so saith the Spirit: for they rest from their labours.
Protestantism the funeral rite is not addressed to the deceased, but to the living, namely his family, to those who remain
Protestantism provides for funerals of great simplicity. In Protestantism the funeral rite is not addressed to the deceased, but to the living, namely his family, to those who remain. It is in fact a matter of recalling the gift of existence made by God to men. Also, in Protestantism, the funeral can take place after the burial of the deceased, without his presence.
The ceremony is not set in stone and the family can often modify it to their liking, for example by asking for a funeral vigil, which is never obligatory. In addition, the funeral liturgy depends on the Protestant denomination to which one belongs.
In the 16th century, Luther rejected extreme anointing and any ceremony surrounding death on the grounds that Christ instituted only two sacraments (baptism and Holy Communion) and only for the living. The Reformation thus transforms the attitude towards death: the deceased being in the hand of God, it is impossible for the living to influence the fate of the dead and there is no need to pray for them. Death and burial take place outside the Church.
Even more severe than the Lutherans in their rejection of Catholic practices, the Reformed went so far as to forbid praise of the deceased. Calvin will demand to be buried in a place unknown to all.
Under pressure from families and to avoid conversions to Catholicism, an evolution took place at the end of the 19th century: since that time, pastors have presided over funeral service cults in the temple, or in another place, but these Services are addressed to the living, their purpose is to proclaim the Gospel with a view to the consolation of the afflicted, the building up of the Church and the evangelization. We do not pray for the dead, however the Lutheran funeral service liturgy includes a delivery of the deceased to God, which is a kind of blessing for the dead.
Prayer for the dead is with the notion of a necessary “purification” of the souls of the dead after the first “particular judgment” and the return of Christ at the end of time and the last judgment. In the tradition of the Roman Church this idea of purification led to the doctrine of “purgatory”, a place where the souls of those who are not sufficiently pure to be immediately admitted to the beatitude of saints and angels before the Church dwell. divine presence, and where the souls undergo a punishment by which they are purified or “purged”, by the “fire”, of their minor sins or the sins not sufficiently repented during their life.
The Orthodox Church does not accept the idea of purgatory or purification by fire, while recognizing the need for purification after death. Without specifying further, the Orthodox Church teaches that the prayers of the living for the deceased contribute to their well-being: God acts according to his will, in response to the prayers of the faithful.