Welcome back to five minutes in church history. Today we're going to look at faith in times of plague.

We'll do this again next week, but this week we're going back to the year 1527 and to Martin Luther. He of course is no stranger to us here on five minutes in

church history, but he lived through a plague and even wrote about it.

November of 1527, Luther published a little pamphlet entitled

Whether One May Flea from a Deadly Plague. Now the plague he was talking about was the

Bubonic Plague. This is the Black Death.

It first came to Europe in 1350.

And those few years, right around 1350, it was so devastating to Europe that it took about a third of the population of Europe.

The plague receded, but then it recurred for really centuries later

and one of those recurrences came to Vittenberg

in the summer of 1527.

By November, Luther decided to write this pamphlet,

whether one may flee from a deadly plague.

It's full of all kinds of practical advice

on how to respond.

Luther even talks in here about the building of hospitals and how hospitals should be built

in such a way as to protect the medical staff as they serve those who are suffering from

a plague.

But towards the end, he delivers a paragraph and I want to read that to you in full. a

but towards the end he delivers a paragraph and I want to read that to you in full because I think there's a lot in there

that we can learn from and we should be paying attention to as we learn from our

good friend Martin Luther.

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