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Scenes and Means of Grace • Gilson Waldkoenig 327 Scenes and Means of Grace • Gilson Waldkoenig 327 Theme Articles Scenes and Means of Grace By Gilson Waldkoenig Abstract: The Word, Baptism, and Holy Communion—key means of grace according to the Lutheran tradition—take place in a web of earthly conditions whenever they are celebrated. Generating their own scenes of grace, the means of grace give voice, sense of place, and creativity where those are otherwise threatened. Other scenes of grace complement the means of grace, similarly bringing voice, place, and creativity in the face of environmental and social injustices. Martin Luther’s affirmation of Christ’s presence in creation, both in means of grace and throughout God’s world, is a strategic and meaningful threshold for Christians to engage environment and justice while continuing to listen and look for the grace in Christ that feeds and shapes them. Key Terms: ecotheology, grace, nature, environment, place, Luther An Appalachian Scene into another round of boom-and-bust exploitation, in cruel repetition of its past. Clear-cut in the nineteenth century, the oil, gas, and coal indus- Tucked into the ridges of Pennsylvania is a little- tries ruled the region thereafter. Communities of known gap in which stunning views from its people imported to work mines, rigs, and mills be- heights match a soundtrack of cascading water in came underemployed when powerful new extractive its depths. Whether climbing the rock slopes, or technologies required fewer workers; and manufac- following the snaking streambed through hemlock, turing, like the energy wealth of Appalachia, was in- laurel, maple, and pine, the place is a threshold creasingly shipped overseas. Revival of the depressed to recovering wilderness, like that which once cov- economy is pitted against the ecological health of ered the Appalachian landscape. Just a few miles the land in each wave of industrial boom or bust. down its paths, the birds, streams, and wind fill Even where the land has suffered, I nevertheless the soundscape; the rocky land makes paved roads have found wilderness sprouting from the barely seem remote; and the smell of ferns and fungi tes- healed scars of abused landscapes. One hopes it tifies to the slow but steady transformation that will come again after the current gas boom ebbs. happens in forest ecosystems. A century of conservation and the preservation of Resiliently re-forested over the last century, vast stretches of state forest, national forest, and the place is unfortunately threatened anew. designated natural areas has restored some of the Mountaintop-removal mining and Marcellus Shale wild landscape. Appalachian wilderness is amazingly “fracking” are denuding and deforming the land- resilient and expresses a long-term resistance to hu- scape in the region. Woods are shorn, mountains man industrial abuse. Returning presence of eco- carved, and waterways ruined. Appalachia plunges systemic communities and non-human neighbors Gilson Waldkoenig, Professor of Church in Society at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg since 1995, recently taught “Environ- mental History of Christianity” and other eco-theology courses. He was a GreenFaith Fellow in 2011 (greenfaith.org). C 2011 Wiley Periodicals and Dialog, Inc. 328 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 50, Number 4 • Winter 2011 • December restores a sense of place in spaces that had been After a section on definitions of scenes and treated as if they were disposable. A surprising kind means, I will look at how the means of grace cre- of creativity cycles death into new life even in ate their own scenes of grace, and then how scenes places where the soil has been depleted and the of grace complement the means of grace. In each rich ecological cycles of forests have been seriously of those sections the categories of voice, place, and disturbed. A recovering wilderness landscape is a creativity describe the particular contours of scenes resiliently graceful scene.1 of grace. The conclusion notes some implications for theology and practice in relationship to environ- ment, and some implications for those who would A Christian Story of Resilience continue to engage Lutheran traditions with eco- logical concerns. The central beliefs and practices of the Christian tradition stem from another story of resilience: the Scenes and Means: Definitions life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the in- carnate Son of God who never flees the flesh, nor abandons the earthly world.2 For many Christians, Miles from Appalachia, on a mesa in Arizona, I Christ’s persistence in earthly things is encountered once visited a poor but venerably historic village through words and rituals, called the means of called Walpi. I gazed over a ring of prayer feathers grace, which happen with earthly elements. Plain that defined the boundary of the village, marking water from the earth’s watersheds is united with the the mesa’s sheer drop-off beyond. Inside the village Word in baptism. Wine grown from the soil and I looked at a ladder rising out of a half-buried kiva, wheat baked in fire join the Word in communion. marking a mystical zone inside, forbidden to me Breath borrowed from the winds proclaims the liv- and other outsiders. The prayer feathers tended the ing Word within the soundscape of this world. boundary against evil from outside; the kiva medi- Those practices draw their elements from natural ated careful interaction with the ambiguous spirit- ecosystems and participate in them.3 world within. I perceived the basic human impulse In this article I want to underscore that the to traipse, and sometimes to dance, over the bound- means of grace create their own scenes of grace, aries of the profane and sacred, the unholy and the and the natural world presents scenes of grace that holy. Observers from a variety of disciplines have complement means of grace. Scenes and means of catalogued an amazing array of boundary-marking grace resound with voices, evoke sense of place, and and boundary-crossing rituals, signs, and beliefs in unleash surprising creativity. This effort to highlight many human cultures. the relationship of scenes of grace with means of The feathers marking the edge of the mesa grace joins other efforts to relate traditional Chris- framed a scene of vastness beyond, and a scene tian theologies and practices to the environment, in of habitation within. Either aspect may be called a hopes that Christians, centered in Christ and grace, scene of grace. Princeton’s lexical database of En- may work for environmental justice, advocacy, and glish gives nine definitions for “scene,” including stewardship.4 Observations in this article draw on “the context and environment in which something two genres seldom brought together: the writings of is set.”5 A scene may be not only the background naturalists, and traditional sources of Lutheran be- but the foreground, and the total conditions up- lief and practice. For Lutherans and other Christian holding an event, figure, or place. When we speak readers, the association of natural scenes of grace of scenery, we commonly diminish the complex with means of grace can be a lively way to revisit web of conditions because the ambient sounds, some important teachings about Christ’s presence temperature, time, light, and shadows overwhelm in creation that sometimes have been obscured in us. The uncharted edges of all that is happen- personalized and disembodied versions of faith. ing at any given time defy our limited frames of Scenes and Means of Grace • Gilson Waldkoenig 329 perception. And so a scene of grace is much more theologies reworked ideas of faith to locate it pri- than scenery, evoking either the vastness surround- marily or exclusively in personal assent and indi- ing a place, or the depth of potential meanings vidual destiny. within a perimeter of habitation.6 Industrialization respects no kiva that warns “en- ter these depths only with fear and trembling.” Modern conceit is to have dispelled the spirits of Lutheran “Means of Grace” earth and sky, reshaping old boundaries between heights and depths to fit human-centered designs. The kiva at the mesa held a space for interaction But the wounded land parallels dis-ease within, and between the habitations of spirit-dancers and the profound regret lurks just beneath recalcitrant in- dwellings of people. That kind of intersection is dif- dustrialism. Having soared to self-designed heights, ferently configured in different traditions and cul- the drop-off to risks and objective problems fright- tures, but endemic to humankind. For Christianity ens finite human beings. Mounting garbage and there are moments identified to be particularly in- industrial waste, dumps in land and ocean, parts- teractive between God and human beings, and they per-million in the atmosphere and junk orbiting the are called in some traditions “means of grace.” For earth, are marks of dis-ease and injustice. While example, the fifth article of the Augsburg Confes- many Christians cling to their faith for comfort sion states that God gave “the gospel and the sacra- about their personal destiny, the incongruence with ments,” and through them, “as through means” or the blight of the planet grows harder and harder to “instruments,” God gives the Holy Spirit and cre- justify. Some crave a healed relationship with the ates faith where and when God wills.7 The seventh earth, with each other, and with God. The means article then affirms the location of the church as the of grace engage that need, and we turn to them place where such means might be found. Lutherans next. favor these means of grace over a penitential system and other rituals, emphasizing that in these means one encounters the gift of grace in Christ Jesus. Looking to promises and commands of Christ in Means of Grace Create Scenes Scripture, Lutherans identify the means of grace as of Grace the Word, baptism, and communion.
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