Fiery

How good that one of my most successful plants (remember - I don't really do gardening) should blaze into full splendour the day before Pentecost. We bought this maybe 40 years ago from people who became our friends; it was a modest azelea that replaced some tired roses in this round bed in our front garden, and now it's so exuberant that I know the very week in which Google Earth satellite photo of my street was taken in.

And that word "exuberant" makes a useful link to another fiery item from today, for it's a perfect word to describe the preaching of Bishop Michael Curry, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America. The sermon he delivered at the Royal wedding this morning was a wonderful lesson in many ways; the main thrust of it was that if love wasn't present then whatever was going on wasn't of God, and the delivery was such that I had a daft smile on my face from beginning to end.  

And I've just watched a Sky News video of an interview with Bishops Michael and Justin, in which Archbishop Justin - a much more alive figure than I've seen for a while - summed it up beautifully:

This was raw God. That's the business.