A Natural Graceby Dee H. Wade In this part of the world, the best ground cover one can hope for is a mat of leaves, built up for years under maturing trees, along with whatever can grow through it. But the leaves we rake away, and in their place grass covers the landscapes around most of our homes, neighborhoods, and towns. Someone made a decision generations ago, and like lemmings, we have followed suit. Pastures, lovely and practical in their rural necessity, have evolved into the front lawns of America, at least in this part of the world. Grass is on my mind today, because I am mowing it, trimming the tight spots with my Lawnboy 2-cycle, while twelve-year-old son Seth rides the John Deere lawn tractor over the islands of grass I create. I am not in the best of moods, for several reasons. One, this grass does not need mowing, as dry as it has been lately, but She Who Must Be Obeyed is prejudiced against all the weeds and the locust tree seedlings that dare to raise their happy little heads above the turf. “It just looks ragged,” she says, and I mutter and I mutter but I also mow. Two, this morning a Sirocco-styled wind whipped into place, oppressive with an angry and humid heat. This is a Gulf breeze, I think, but by the time it has traveled this far inland, all the refreshment has been wrung out of it. Our mower's addition of hot gas fumes, which the sun will soon turn into ground level ozone, only adds to the misery of the day. I'm also mad at myself. I have a confession to make. I have sinned. I'm thinking of turning this confession into one of those Unison Prayers Of which many of us are used to seeing at the top of our Sunday bulletins. It would go like this: Forgive us, Lord, for saying yes to the All Green All the Time Everywhere Petro-Chemical Company when they called on the phone last winter during supper and for contracting with them to make our lawn “look better.” We have been lazy yard stewards, for if our grass needs more nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, or lime, we should spread it ourselves instead of paying someone to do it for us, whose incentive is to sacrifice care for speed. But worse than that, Lord, is the damage we are doing with all these fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. They damage our wallets, because they are expensive, and they damage the environment, washing into streams with a polluting blast of nutrients and a toxic chaser. Just to kill a few grubs, we wind up sterilizing the ground. We have overreached, God of creation, and the earthworms, nematodes, good bacteria, and the other creatures You designed to produce healthy soil are paying for our sins with their lives. The prayer continues (it is a rather long prayer, I must admit, and might need some trimming itself before it reaches the Office Administrator's desk, for great will be the moan of her): Chide us for the hubris of our horticulture, which we impose on the landscape without first consulting its native wisdom. Look upon us with pity for our lack of imagination, as we try to make each yard look just like every other yard on the block, reducing the vast variety of vegetation You offer to cover the ground into a conformist handful of species. Save us from feeding our lawns a richer diet than many of Your children enjoy. For three transgressions and four, do not withhold Your judgment against us for chewing up good farmland with subdivisions, needlessly leveling trees, and squandering resources better used for raising corn and pleasing milk cows. Have mercy, O Lord, for we are most egregious sinners. Teach us a wiser stewardship of Your land, water, and air. Help us to live more abundantly on less, to appreciate the earth's green growth for its own sake, and bring us into your peaceable kingdom where the Plantain will lie down with the Fescue, the Sheep Sorrel will eat mulch with the Blue Grass, the Violet will drink rain water with the Zoysia, and little barefoot boys and girls will make necklaces for each other out of white clover blossoms. In the name of the One who advised us to consider the lilies of the field, we pray. Amen. Whew! Now I feel better! Confession is good for the soul. In fact, I'm feeling doggone self-righteous, and that's a satisfying feeling to have. With the enthusiasm of a fresh convert, I know I'm right and anyone who thinks differently is wrong. So certain am I that I want to purify the world around me before it's too late. I want to educate the masses with my point of view and help change their behavior. And if they cannot or will not do that, then they can go straight to youknowwhere! This issue is sine qua non with me. Without this right belief on yard ecology, can you truly call yourself a Christian? There is no quibbling allowed, because the very health of God's creation is at stake. Only dead possums inhabit the middle of the road. If you've ever sprayed Weed B Gone with wanton abandon and you can't pray my sinner's prayer with me, you and I are no longer in fellowship. Here I stand! None other can I do. Why, just the other day, I was reading a book that said that the church ought to be a place where a woman can pass out pro-life literature during the after worship coffee hour if that were her persuasion, and a man ought to be allowed to sign-up people to a pro-choice rally if that were his, and that the church itself shouldn't have to make a decision on this issue one way or the other. The very idea! There ought to be a law! It would be just as unconscionable for the chairman of the local chapter of the Sierra Club to be caught sitting in the pew next to the president of the All Green All the Time Everywhere Chemical Company. What's next? A Kentucky redneck signing the fellowship pad after a New England blue blood? Leontyne Price sharing a hymnal with Waylon Jennings? The Reverend Jerry Falwell passing the communion tray to Bishop John Shelby Spong? What kind of church would that be? Goodness gracious: Jesus gave the boot to the money changers; surely he would do the same here—throw out the bad guys and keep the good ones. Okay; the jig's up. I have another confession to make. I've been reading a lot of Paul lately. Specifically, the Epistle to the Galatians. You get a little prickly when you read Paul, so please excuse my sarcasm. But Paul has impressed me once again with his thorough reliance upon the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Paul will allow no other qualifying mark to be added to the faith of Christ, by which we are made right with God. If we are right with God, then we are right with each other; are, in fact, one with each other in Christ. That should settle the matter of our unity as members of the beloved community. We are one not because we agree on this issue or that one, not because we trace over the same theological outlines, not because we practice our faith in the same way, and not because we sing from the same hymnbook. We are undivided because Christ is undivided, even though we are prone to divvy-up Christ's body seven ways from Sunday. Ecology-nuts like me have our texts that prove our spiritual superiority over the less enlightened. Others have theirs. For the Galatians, it was the “circumcision party” that tried to separate “true” believers from pretenders. But Paul will have none of it. Faith has no religious precondition. Religion itself is passé, according to Paul, as are other “fleshy” distinctions we put so much stock in: There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:28). Ecology-nuts like me prefer to associate with our own kind, and to say mean things about the other kind. It's only natural. But in Christ, grace trumps human nature. Until Christ issues another order, we eco-freaks in the church are stuck with people who are oblivious to the environment as well as with those who trash it, by ignorance and by calculation. And they are stuck with us, made to put up with our smugness, our hypocrisy, and our insufferable self-righteousness. Neither of us likes it this way. So what? asks Paul. Get used to it. God has to put up with both of you. The Gospel is not about you anyway. It's about Jesus and how everything has changed because of his death on the cross. You all have changed as well, believe it or not. And if you believe, you will learn to serve each other, tree-hugger waiting on the person who never met a tree he liked, and vice versa, helping to build a new community of mutual love and concern. As you do that, you will find—not happiness, probably—but joy. You will be blessed with mercy and peace. In our denomination's present unrest, extremists on both sides seem poised to watch their opponents scatter to the hills, so certain they are of their own rectitude. But what issue, practice, or belief—go ahead, name it— is the sine qua non of faith, the “without which, not” of faith? Is it as important and as consequential as the grace of God? Is it an essential part of the faith of Christ? Really, now, who or what do we worship and adore: God, or our own integrity? Here's an exercise one might try in times like these. Read Paul's Letter to the Galatians. Carefully. Wind your way along to the 6th chapter, 15th verse. Keeping it in context, understanding that these are prophetic and apocalyptic words, and remembering how important circumcision is in the Bible, hear Pauls say: For neither is circumcision anything nor is uncircumcision anything. What is something is the new creation. (J. Louis Martyn, trans., vol. 33a of The Anchor Bible, Doubleday, 1997). Next, place whatever it is that matters most to you alongside the grace of God. If you are sincerely convinced that your belief, practice, or issue is indeed an essential, inseparable part of the faith of Christ, that it is worth leaving the church over or forcing others to leave it, then go ahead and fight the good fight, and may God bless. But if you have the slightest doubt about the primacy of your principle—its bottom-line, prerequisite status—then run it through Paul's pattern. If you can trust your hard-won ideal to the grace of God, then, for Christ's sake, stay in fellowship with those whose ideals are different. I'll play first, after a couple of warm-ups. For neither is drinking bourbon whiskey anything, For neither is social action anything Is it beginning to hurt yet? Feel the burn? I do, because I'm not sure I trust the grace of God that much. But I promised, so here I go: For neither is a moral relationship with nature
anything Ouch. While I lick my wounds, you play. At the end of your round, let's meet in the clubhouse and share a cool draft of mercy and peace.
Dee Wade is pastor of Anchorage Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
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