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NEVADA: U.S. Episcopal leader says church must be inclusive
by Frank X. Mullen
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
10/10/2005
The Episcopal Church must reach out and "embrace all whom God sets before us," the church's top American cleric told a Sparks' congregation Sunday.
The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church in the United States, gave a sermon at St. Paul's Episcopal Church as part of the Diocese of Nevada's annual convention this weekend.
The event coincided with the 100th anniversary of St. Paul's.
In his sermon, Griswold cited Christ's analogy of the kingdom of heaven being like a wedding banquet, a feast reserved not for the chosen but for all people.
"And so the door to the banquet hall is flung wide and all sorts of riffraff, troublesome to us but close to the heart of God, are ushered in and given a place at the table," Griswold said.
He also cited the example from the Book of Matthew, in which Jesus learned a lesson from a "Canaanite woman, a gentile, who stood outside the community and was therefore beyond what Jesus perceived to be the proper sphere of his ministry."
Griswold said the woman showed Christ that his message should be available to all people and not just the Jews who prophesied his coming. "Just as Jesus, in the full force of his humanity, was stretched and broken open by his encounter with the Canaanite woman, so too God's way with us," he said. "... Relinquish the comfort of our narrow and self-protective points of view and make room for the other whose ways may be strange, if not incomprehensible."
Griswold said his message of tolerance and inclusion comes from his 43 years as a priest who had to learn the lesson for himself. He said he had "to make room for otherness, often with great difficulty, and to recognize in the face of the unsettling stranger the real presence of Christ."
He said that God's truth is revealed in the world around us, in the cosmos, in the workings of the human body and in our understanding of ourselves as persons.
"Let us ask God to expand our hearts and give us the capacity to embrace all whom God sets before us," Griswold said.
"Let us pray we will find ourselves able to make room and give welcome to the stranger: those in the streets, those who shock and unsettle us, those who stretch and challenge our notions of community, those whose truth may threaten our own.
"In so doing we may encounter the One who is the way, the truth and the life -- the One, in whom alone, is our freedom and our joy."
http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051010/NEWS10/510100339/1002/NEWS
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