"We may think that God intends to paralyze us with unexpected beauty; instead God is shaking us up, stirring us up, and zapping us with truth and hope and beauty so that we don’t lose sight of what God made us to be," Anderson said in the keynote sermon during the Christ Church Cathedral Flower Festival Eucharist in St. Louis May 3. "We are not to be paralyzed by the beauty of creation, but we are to be called more deeply and more profoundly into God’s service by it."

The Flower Festival dates to 1890 after Missouri Botanical Garden founder Henry Shaw stipulated in his will that after his death an annual sermon be preached "on the wisdom and goodness of God as shown in the growth of flowers, fruits and other products of the vegetable kingdom."

That sermon, which has been preached annually since then with the exception of 1950 and 1951, blossomed into an accompanying street festival. Many famous preachers have given the annual sermon as have lay people, including some of the directors of the garden.

In his will, Shaw named the bishop of the Missouri diocese and his successors as permanent trustees of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and left the choice of the annual Flower sermon preacher to the bishop. The current bishop, George Wayne Smith, invited Anderson to participate in the two-day event whose theme was "The Green Church: Ecclesiastic Environmentalism."

During the May 3 keynote sermon, Anderson said God brings us "beauty, flowers, trees, vegetables, fruits, rain, thunder and lightning, new life in spring, snow, and leaves that put on a show so spectacular that it can take our breath away" to "remind us of our job" to love and serve God with all our heart and all our soul.

"It is our job to value and tend it all; the most enormous and the smallest, the mustard seed," she said. "It is our job to hold the Kingdom of God in our mind’s eye so that we can recall it and draw strength from it when we are wearied by the changes and the chances of this life. And it is our job to keep the promise we make to God and to each other -- to love our neighbors as ourselves."

Anderson, recalling the vows of the Baptismal Covenant, added that "God surrounds us with the beauty of this fragile earth, not so we will appreciate it and then go on our merry way, but so that we will be reminded of our baptismal promise to love and serve God."

"This is where the church, where we as God’s people, intersects with the natural order," she said.

The beauty of the earth can both renew and challenge people to work against poverty, injustice and the degradation of creation, Anderson said.

During Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral on May 4, Anderson focused on God's call to community.

Christian community "has to do with what our job is" and has to do with laity, clergy, and bishops "using our gifts for the glory of God, for the reconciliation of the world, for the bringing about of the kingdom," she said.

"We are meant to live in harmony and Christian community with each other, the earth and all creation," Anderson said.

"For the love of God, we are required to move away from individualism toward community," but being a community of Christians is not easy, she said.

"God puts us into the context of community whether we like it or not and it is there that we find ourselves transformed," Anderson told the congregation, adding that "community makes us who we are and who we are becoming.

"I am always amazed when people describe themselves as 'spiritual but not religious," she remarked. "What does that mean? Mostly it means that they don’t want to be bothered by the hard work of community. It is hard work, and we can’t just walk away from it."

Anderson acknowledged that truly being in community requires people to be vulnerable with each other.

"God has given us each other," she said. "God has given us joy and angst, generosity of spirit, and even anger."

Community consists of more than those who live in the here-and-now, Anderson suggested.

"God has given us the community of saints, from whom we get strength and God has given us the community represented here," she said. "God has given us each other and this peculiar life that we find ourselves in -- this peculiar life that draws us to each other and in some peculiar and holy way tangles us up with the Holy Spirit in the context of a beautiful and fragile earth and puts us in community and relationships that we probably would not choose, prods us into living out our religion and spirituality in that amazing context and then, somehow makes us one."

-- The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is Episcopal Life Media correspondent for Episcopal Church governance, structure, and trends, as well as news of the dioceses of Province II. She is based in Neptune, New Jersey, and New York City.