I had planned this morning to offer the standard twenty minute sermon, but as I began writing, I realized two things: first, that preaching the week after Bishop Grey is like taking the stage with your cello after Yo-Yo Ma has left it, which means I’ve had to spend more time trying to find the right words; and second, that after the lengthy business meeting last week, everybody here is due for a shorter homily.

Here it is:

As you know, a section towards the end of the Book of Common Prayer contains a 70 prayers and 11 thanksgivings. The prayers focus on a wide variety of everyday concerns: for the church, for those who live alone, for families, for our enemies, our country and its leaders, for the oppressed and addicted—the list is long, and I think gives a proper appreciation for the vast intersections of world and spirit. Our mission as Christians, as our church leaders knew, is broad.

I don’t think it is an accident that the first prayer of the lot is “For Joy in God’s Creation.” It reads, “O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works; that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, we may learn to serve thee with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, thy Son Jesus Christ Our Lord.”

A number of interesting undercurrents runs throughout this prayer, and they have much to do with the Psalm we read earlier today.

First, there is an acknowledgement that God is the source of beauty.

Second, that it is shared with us graciously, as it was created for His beloved Son, but shared with us. Third, that as we discern God’s hand in this beauty, we also rejoice in what he has created. And finally, we return thanks to God through glad service of his commandments.

This prayer—and the Psalm, which we’ll discuss in a minute—help us to see that Joy in God’s creation and in God’s word should be the highest pleasures in our lives. We need it dearly. It must be felt with every fiber of our being. It is the GOOD NEWS! It is not mere beauty.

Beauty is ephemeral. It is not merely cerebral. Knowing about it isn’t good enough. As the eighteenth-century American minister Jonathan Edwards said, there is a difference between knowing of God’s divine and supernatural light and experiencing it, just as there is a difference between knowing of the taste of honey, and actually having had the pleasure of tasting it. The two are not the same.

Such Joy seems like it should be easy to achieve. If God’s beauty is everywhere, then we should be able to soak it up like so many happy sponges. Yet it seems that we sometimes have trouble discerning God’s hand in joyful events, or, more ominously, in the busy, task-driven world of our everyday lives. Think of all the simple, little things that must be accomplished before one even gets to work in the morning. The pets must be let out, the children roused and fed, the paper read, the dishes put in the sink. There’s a shower to be taken, socks to be found, lunch money to be sent, bookbags to be double-checked, cars to be warmed up, seat belts to be fastened. And then it’s out of the driveway we go—but wait! The coffee mug and the cell phone are still on the buffet! And we’re four minutes behind schedule! And the day has just begun!

Days like these should lead us to savor moments of peace when they descend to us. Yet for many, the closest we come to joy is sleep.

This is neither right nor good. We scurry about, getting as much work done as possible so we can get home in time to make supper—and, if we’re lucky, listen to something beautiful on the radio, or watch something entertaining on the tube, or take a kid to baseball practice or dance lessons. And while such things might make us happy, they do not necessarily impart to us the joy that the prayer and the psalm exhort us to find. Happiness, like beauty, is ephemeral. It disappears as soon as the wrong team wins the basketball game, or some idiot drives too slow in the left-hand lane when we’re in a hurry to get home and relax. Such moments remind us that we often mistake happiness or beauty for joy.

Happiness and beauty lack the groundedness that the Book of Common Prayer teaches us to pray for, or the Psalm urges us to feel.

After asking for the grace to discern God’s presence, the prayer for joy in God’s creation ends with the command to serve God with gladness. This command rescues the prayer from the bumper-sticker sentimentality of “following our bliss” because it forces us to express gratitude for the source of our joy by becoming servants of the Lord. Or, to use the language Bishop Gray used last week, by serving God and His church, we are freer to articulate the joy of knowing in our hearts that we are children of God. The absolute conviction of this connects us with other Christians in ways that the mere pursuit of beauty or of happiness cannot. More important, the absolute conviction of this fills our hearts with God’s joy.

The Psalmist acknowledges this as well in various portions of what we have read for the day. The imagery of light used in the psalm reflects that biblical tradition that light may be equated with life and happiness: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?” King David, who is often credited with the authorship of this Psalm, led a life with vastly different political realities than ours.

It is no accident that he equates the light of God with freedom from fear. The association of God with life is made in the specific context of trust and reliance upon God.

David has accepted what many of us forget: that we can live joyfully in God through our activities rather than in spite of them. As one commentator on this Psalm has noted, those whose spiritual rhythms are restored and vibrant are those who live daily from a deep center, from a sense of rootedness in God. Scripture and our experience do not deny that most of our lives we feel like torn and scattered people.

Other portions of the Psalm sound more like a lament than a song of joy.

In the portion excerpted for today—the whole Psalm is eighteen verses—we see four references to fear and to enemies. Yet, even in those circumstances we can ask God to help us seek one thing: to rest joyfully in God, just as David does when he beholds the fair—joyful, if you will—beauty of the Lord. Amen.