In every era, the church must find ways in which to speak the language of the times. Our vocation as preachers of the Good News depends absolutely upon our ability to proclaim the gospel in such a way that it engages the zeitgeist. This has always been difficult, but never more so than during those periods of time when the basic philosophical orientation of a culture is in flux. A cursory reading of history will reveal that the church has a record that could charitably be described as “uneven” during these challenging times.

Today the greatest challenge facing the church is arguably the challenge to move from preaching in the spirit of modernism, with its delightfully comforting dualistic categories of good & evil, godly & worldly, gay & straight, toward preaching in a postmodern culture, where the value (and even the reality) of such hard and fast categories are increasingly called into question.

In 2008, Ron Allen reminded readers of Homily Service that Jesus had addressed both the difficulty of making such hard and fast distinctions, and the wisdom of attempting to act upon them when he wrote an exegesis of this week’s Gospel lesson: Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43.

Some folk presumed to know fully and finally whom God would condemn. Others were uncertain as to whether their interpretation of God’s purposes was really adequate. Members disagreed with one another regarding how to respond to others who were drifting away. Allegorically, the field is the world. Jesus (the Son of Man has sown the good seed of alerting the world to the realm and some have embraced it. The devil, however, has sown bad seed in the world (evil) and some have allied themselves with it. In the early stages of growth, it is almost impossible to distinguish tender wheat from young weeds. The farmer (congregation) should let them grow together, trusting that at the apocalypse, God will send angels to gather the evil ones and destroy them, while the righteous “will shine like the sun.” The parable cautions the followers of Jesus not to assume the role of judge, but to be patient in the confidence that God will make the final determination especially with regard to ambiguous situations. In our culture, so quick to judge, this message is often welcome. We need to be patient with some of the ambiguities of history. However, this text raises the issue of the limits of tolerance. Is it sometimes necessary for a congregation to draw the line? If so, what are the criteria for coming to such a conclusion?

Indeed, the question remains “what are the criteria?” In 996 Fr. Robert F. Capon applied this dilemma to the question of the forgiveness of clerical sin in particular when he said, “The hardest thing is to teach a two-year-old that a long stick has two ends: the one she’s holding with a short grip to move her doll furniture around on the coffee table, and the other that’s knocking her mother’s Limoges off the mantelpiece. Fuss long enough with running sinners out of ministerial employment, and you’ll knock all the crockery of grace off the church’s shelf.” (The Romance of the Word: Eerdmans 1996, p. 7.)

Homily Service: An Ecumenical Resource for Sharing the Word, vol. 41 no. 3 (11 May 2008 – 31 August 2008), pp. 109-110

Ronald J. Allen is the Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Preaching and New Testament at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is the author of many books in the area of homiletics, most recently A Faith of Your Own: Naming What You Really Believe.

Among the many sorts of opportunities for interreligious prayer envisioned by the various authors in this volume of Liturgy is the occasion of community gatherings for civic or patriotic observances. Several of the authors mention the recently-minted observance of Patriot Day, held on 11 September each year. Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Independence Day are also often occasions when the liturgical leaders of religiously diverse communities are invited to come together to plan interfaith observances.


In 2005, D. Brent Latham invited readers of Liturgy to consider the ways in which the practices of civil religion can come into conflict with the basic faith commitments of both Jews and Christians as those commitments are enshrined in the decalogue.

To state the obvious: the first commandment presupposes the existence and identity of the community it commands. Less obviously, this community is created and identified by reception of the first commandment. That is, this command forms the very community that it informs. This reciprocal relation means that if we get the community wrong, we’ll get the commandment wrong too... Our liturgical language often manifests this confusion. On such days, the pronoun “we”gets used in praise, prayer, and proclamation in ways that exclude the brother from Canada and the sister from the Congo. Thus the first commandment is broken, not by having another god, but by not having the Christian brother and sister. That is to say, the first commandment is broken not only by polytheism, but also by patriotism—because it refuses the catholicity of Christ’s body.
[From Brent Latham, "Worshiping the Decalogue's God," Liturgy 20:1 pp. 61-66]

How does this reminder of the imperative to perform the catholicity of Christian identity call into question our efforts at interreligious civic worship?

D. Brenth Laytham is Professor of Theology and Ethics at North Park Theological Seminary, and is the author of iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment, forthcoming from Cascade Books.