AMERICAN PREACHER A ROYAL CHOICE
Renowned Rev spoke of power of love at wedding
The U.S. preacher invited by the royal couple to address Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding is an outspoken civil rights leader, born in Chicago to the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers whose powerful sermons speak to the rich and poor alike.
“He’s a down-to-earth person. He can relate to anyone,” Harry Maurice Croxton Jr., a friend of the Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry, told the Herald.
Croxton said he met Curry when he was a pastor of St. James Episcopal Church in Baltimore from 1988 to 2000, prior to him being named a bishop in North Carolina. Curry was then elevated to the presiding bishop of the whole Episcopal Church in the U.S. in 2015.
“He shows much love within him. And you could be the evilest person in the world and you come into church to repent, and he will figure you out right then and there,” Croxton said. “He is a good prophet.”
Curry, an outspoken civil rights activist who backed gay marriage, was invited by the royal couple in March to speak at yesterday’s wedding. Prince Harry and Markle didn’t know the bishop personally, but his renown as a preacher won him the tough job of preaching to the elite gathering.
The sermon zeroed in on the power of love, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. and a spiritual sung by “old slaves in America’s Antebellum South,” Curry said.
“Oh, there’s power — power in love,” he said. “Not just in its romantic forms, but any form, any shape of love. There’s a certain sense in which when you are loved, and you know it, when someone cares for you, and you know it, when you love and you show it — it actually feels right. There’s something right about it. “And there’s a reason for it. The reason has to do with the source.
We were made by a power of love, and our lives were meant — and are meant — to be lived in that love. That’s why we are here,” Curry said. “Ultimately, the source of love is God himself: the source of all of our lives.”
Curry’s biography says he’s the descendant of slaves brought to North America. His father was an Episcopal priest and his mother, a devout Episcopalian. He was born in Chicago, raised in Buffalo, N.Y., and studied at Yale and Princeton universities.
‘He shows much love within him. And you could be the evilest person in the world and you come into church to repent, and he will figure you out right then and there.’
— HARRY MAURICE CROXTON JR., friend of the Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry