A Prayer to Satan?
By the Revd. Chris Dow, PBSC National Vice-Chairman. This article is excerpted from his essay “A Curious Prayer and the Inversion of Scripture” which appeared in the Living Church magazine “Covenant” in June 2025. The full essay may be found here.
Drawing on biblical imagery in prayer is powerful. It mirrors back to God his inspired Word and demonstrates how Scripture soaks into our imagination and shapes the language we use to speak to God. There are many shining examples of scripturally saturated prayers in the Anglican tradition. Among the greatest is the Collect for Ash Wednesday, in which we ask God to “create and make in us new and contrite hearts”. This sums up the spirit and purpose of the Lenten season by blending David’s penitential plea (Ps. 51:10) with Ezekiel’s prophesy of the new covenant and new creation (36:26). Such biblically informed prayers serve God’s people well.
Yet there is a collect in use in the Anglican Church of Canada that draws on Scripture in a troubling way. While it is difficult to frame this observation without seeming inflammatory, the most objective reading of the prayer suggests that it is addressed to the one responsible for the actions it describes—actions that are spoken of in a favorable light. In this case, that one would be Satan.
The prayer in question is Collect II for the Sunday between July 24 and 30 in Year A, which may be found in Alternative Collects for the Years A, B, and C in the Revised Common Lectionary (p. 37):
Scandalous God, you sow weeds among the crop, raise bread with impure yeast, offer treasure without price and cast a net that catches good and bad: throw down our idols of purity and possession, so that you might reveal in us your wide-branching love; through Jesus Christ, the stumbling block. Amen.
The second line of this collect is a clear reference to Matthew 13:24-30, Christ’s parable of the weeds. There is no ambiguity in that parable. Jesus speaks of one sowing good seed, and another, “an enemy”, who comes and sows weeds among the wheat. For good measure, Jesus even explains the parable and explicitly identifies both the weeds and their sower: “the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil”.
Next the collect makes another biblical allusion: “bread with impure yeast”. But here again, this is imagery Jesus uses to warn against the Pharisees and Sadducees, the impure yeast symbolizing the corrupting influence of religious leaders who mislead people (Matt. 16:6, 11-12; Mark 8:15; Luke 12:1). Some may object to this inference, pointing out that Jesus elsewhere uses leaven to describe the growth of his kingdom (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:21), but if these are the passages to which the prayer is alluding, why emphasize that the leaven is “impure”? The reference is unambiguous—and equally unambiguous is Jesus’ meaning.
Yet another biblical reference is made to the dragnet that catches fish of every kind (Matt. 13:47-50). Strangely implying that the net was cast directly by God, not human fishermen, no mention is made of the bad fish being sorted and thrown away. Christ explains, again without ambiguity, that the bad fish are the “wicked” who, at the end of the age, will be taken out from among the righteous and cast into a “blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.
It is staggering how much Scripture this prayer draws upon and, at every turn, inverts.
Yet although the presence of such a prayer in our authorized liturgies is certainly troubling, Anglicans in Canada should not despair. Consider the letters to the churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia in the Book of Revelation (2:8-11; 3:7-13). These were also written to identify the influences of the enemy in the churches. But notice that the tone of these letters is affirming, and their purpose is to encourage Christians not to “fear”, to endure “tribulation”, to keep “the word of [Christ’s] perseverance”, and to “overcome”.
It’s also wise to remember that our Anglican formularies anticipate strange developments and departures from the faith. Article XXI states that “General Councils” and synods of the Church “may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God” because they are assemblies of fallible humans, “whereof not all be governed with the Spirit and Word of God”.
Finally, although this prayer was authorized by General Synod in 2019, the 1962 Book of Common Prayer remains our standard of doctrine and worship, and it contains over 60 references to the devil that warn against him and pray for his downfall. For example, in the Great Litany we pray that God would work “to strengthen such as do stand; to encourage the faint-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet”.
I pray that Satan will be beaten down through an effort to remove this deeply problematic collect, or at least discourage its use. But if this does not happen shortly, there is comfort in the very parables to which it alludes. Their consistent message is that God is sovereign, and the matter will be sorted “at the end of the age” (Matt. 13:40). Even so, may that time come quickly (Rev. 22:20).