Hallelujah ... Bishop Curry really is one hot preacher!
HE CAME, he preached and he reduced most of the congregation to a state of near-uncontrollable giggles. It is difficult to know who cracked first, but from the angle of the TV cameras, it looked suspiciously like Camilla, her hat bobbing up and down as she tried to veil her loss of composure.
But did it matter? Not a jot. This was a day when stiff upper lips were being left at the chapel door along with any knowledge of what we were going to get from the Most Reverend Michael Curry, the charismatic 65-year-old Bishop and Primate of America’s Episcopal Church, who had been described by Archbishop Justin Welby as a ‘stunning preacher’.
If the archbishop knew what was about to be unleashed from the pulpit to two billion viewers, he was keeping mum – and just as well, because what followed was no set ecclesiastical script.
Bishop Curry opened with the impassioned words of the civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King: ‘We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we do that, we will be able to make of this old world a new world. Love is the only way.’ And then he threw away the rule book.
Admittedly, he didn’t perform a cartwheel down the aisle and he decided against ordering the shaft of light from above, but there were parts of his sermon that could have been delivered by James Brown’s hallelujah preacher from The Blues Brothers. Conspicuously seated below the Queen and Prince Philip, Prince William managed to stifle a smirk while his cousin, the usually unshakeable Zara Phillips, looked agog and David Beckham grinned broadly – although it seems even this barnstorming sermon failed to stir his wife’s emotions.
Bishop Curry addressed his audience as ‘brothers and sisters’ and told us: ‘Jesus didn’t have a doctorate in dying’, which had even Prince Charles staring down at his palms. The son of God didn’t sacrifice his life for himself, ‘or anything he could get out of it’, phrasing that certainly raised a few eyebrows across the 14th century pews.
And boy he went on – and on – seemingly the only extemporised element in an otherwise meticulously controlled event.
Like all great preachers, there was an arm-raising emphasis on passion with much time given over to imploring us to believe in the power of love.
‘Don’t underestimate it. Anyone who has ever fallen in love knows what I mean,’ he told us before expounding for a good few more minutes on fire.
There wasn’t anything, or anyone it seemed, who wasn’t on fire or travelling by fire.
He himself had not walked across the water, he had come from the US on fire.
The larger-than-life bishop was not known to the newlyweds personally, apparently, but they asked him to be part of their service precisely because of his record of outspoken criticism of social injustice and support for liberal causes. All I can say is, good for them.
Despite his unorthodox, left-field delivery, Bishop Curry was a breath of fresh air, capable of uniting as mixed and diverse a congregation as we have yet to see at a royal wedding. He wore his politics lightly. True, there can be no doubt his decision to quote from the African-American slavery song Down By The Riverside came from the heart, but even if we didn’t know his own parents were descended from slaves, we do know that he has achieved something few of us can only dream of – putting a smile on a nation’s face. Priceless.
‘Who cracked first? It looked like Camilla’