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.

This is a fictional interpretation and equally fictional exegesis of the Canaanite story. It is not Jesus who is "stretched" it is the woman. It is she who cries out to Jesus, "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed."

Jesus has the supernatural power to heal this woman as well as to forgive sins, and He does so to demonstrate his authority over demonic forces as Son of God and Son of Man. Jesus' statement in verse 24 does not preclude a later mission to Gentiles (referred to here as "dogs") but at no time was Jesus "stretched and broken" by his encounter with the Canaanite woman, that is the language of the cross not encounter, the place of redemption and atonement.

Griswold says, "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."

This is code language for pansexual behavior. This is Griswold trying to get the orthodox in the Episcopal Church and the rest of the Anglican Communion to accept Bishop V. Gene Robinson, nothing more, nothing less. It is trying to broker a form of sexual behavior into the church that St. Paul specifically condemns.

A church that is washed in the blood of the Lamb is not a church that whitewashes sin.

Griswold should also be reminded that there are many in God's kingdom who are not to be found in the church, and there are many in the church who will not be found 'in that day' in the Kingdom.

Many will say "Lord, Lord..." and He will say "depart from me I never knew you."

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."

But making room for others does not mean we endorse their behaviors. We do not preach inclusivity, we preach transformation, and not to preach that message is to ignore a lot of teaching from Jesus who talks about the wheat and the tares, the sheep and the goats, dying branches and vines, the saved and the lost, and the last verses of Matthew's gospel where Jesus sits on his glorious throne and he separates (as the shepherd) the sheep from the goats...and to the goats He will say, "Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels."

Griswold 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.

This is to muddle naturalism and supernaturalism, the created order with the creator and to give off the message "I'm Gay and I'm okay".

As Patrick Henry Reardon writes in TOUCHSTONE magazine, "the biblical literature allows of no moral relativism based on cultural standards. On the contrary, the differences between the sheep and the goats are discerned by applying exactly the same moral rules across the board."

"Thus Phoenicians and Carthaginians will not be able to appeal to their particular cultural norms as a defense for child sacrifice. Citizens of the Roman Empire will not be permitted to please the rules of their culture to justify their tolerance for homosexuality. Contemporary Africans who conduct female genital mutilation will not be excused by the inherited standards that encourage that practice," says Reardon. And Frank Griswold will not be permitted to preach and practice inclusion at the expense of a transforming gospel, leaving people in spiritual darkness, when he swore an oath to lead people to the light.

"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."

The allusion to Peter's vision at Joppa and God showing no partiality was to allow Gentiles to receive the Holy Spirit, and the operative verse is, "that through His name everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins." (Acts 10:43) Griswold conveniently ignores that fact.

That the church should be color blind, gender blind, age blind and hair loss blind is not a green light for inclusion, but an opportunity to shine the light of God's truth into hearts that it might penetrate our inner selves bringing us to repentance and to belief in the gospel. Griswold's sermon falls far short of doing that.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Judgment begins first with the household of God, and judgment is surely falling on the Episcopal Church and its theologically flawed and failed leadership, especially the failed leadership of Frank Griswold.

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