Susan Russell: "YES!"

"YES!" from An Inch at a Time 's reflections on the Investiture of the 26th Presiding Bishop:

I was reminded when the Gospel lesson was read … the story from Luke about Jesus “coming home” to Nazareth and preaching a similar sermon to his own hometown crowd … that the response was not to have “cake on the lawn” and a reception honoring the village-son-returning-home. Rather, challenging their status quo turned them into an enraged mob that tried to throw him off the cliff. And I wondered if in some way this Episcopal Church … striving to “be Jesus” in the world today … isn’t facing precisely the same reaction from some of our Anglican hometown crowd.

Our proclamation that “the year of the Lord’s favor is NOW” by working to fully include all of the baptized into the Body of Christ, by raising up into leadership women with grace and faith and gifts and power and by embracing MDGs that push us to reach out to the marginalized, oppressed and captive in very real ways has sent some looking for a cliff to throw the American Episcopal Church off. The Good News, of course, is that our Lord moved through the crowd miraculously unscathed – and that, I pray, will be a miracle that will surround +Katharine as she represents us to the world.