Commontide
Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant N. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.
This prayer appears in more than one place in the 2019 Book of Common Prayer.
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Spoken over the body at burial, this commendation entrusts the deceased to Christ the Good Shepherd as "a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming." Its distinctive form traces to Caroline bishop John Cosin's private devotions of 1627 and entered the prayer-book tradition through the 1928 American BCP, which restored prayers for the dead absent since 1552; it has remained through every later US revision to ACNA 2019.