“Let There Be Life!” A Sermonic Call to Ecological Witness

Anthropogenic climate change is causing catastrophic harm to populations and bioregions across the globe. Sustained attention to the climate crisis is needed in every scholarly and practical discipline, each according to its strengths, if we are to learn how to respond effectively to the ecological crisis and its consequences for human communities and other living beings. 

Focused engagement is needed within the humanities and scientific fields alike, including agriculture, animal science, botany, cultural studies, economics, ethics, history, law, literature, engineering, marine biology, the performing arts, philosophy, religious studies, technology management, zoology, and more. Sociologists, mental health professionals, and pastoral theologians need to help us understand climate-change denial, climate anxiety, grief, and resilience. Anthropologists, historians, and political scientists must offer their expertise about vectors of beneficial change and reactionary backlash in political structures and social formations. Scholars of literature, the arts, Indigenous studies, peace studies, and related disciplines need to craft artistic and activist responses that honor diverse cultural heritages and envision interventions to secure the flourishing of particular constituencies and the common good. 

Spiritual humility and ecological wisdom alike teach us that it’s time to let go of anthropocentrism—the idea that human beings are the center of the universe. Instead, we can rejoice that all creatures belong to Jesus … 

Theologians, ethicists, and spiritual practitioners are among those needed to bear witness in this time of crisis for the living community of Earth. Preachers in many religious traditions, as public theologians who have regular opportunities to address gathered communities, have a crucial role to play in this work. Through homiletical witness, Christian preachers can offer theologically deep and compelling perspectives on our mutual accountability in the light of divine love, pointing to incarnational theology that honors the experiences and giftedness of all living things, lifting up interspecies kinship as integral to the Body of Christ, and proclaiming an expansive pneumatology that sees the Holy Spirit at work not only in human cultures but throughout creation.

Preachers eager to invite hearers into deeper climate awareness and catalyze transformative change will want to preach ecologically focused sermons regularly. Eco-preachers will assuredly want to focus on ecological matters on the Sunday closest to Earth Day (April 22) and in the five weeks of the liturgical Season of Creation, which runs from September 1 to October 4, the feast of Francis of Assisi. But other occasions are available as well. Many opportunities present themselves, from World Wetlands Day (February 2) and the International Day of Forests (March 21) to World Oceans Day (June 8), the International Day of Climate Action (October 24), World Soil Day (December 5), and other dates intended to spur collective visioning and changemaking. Every preacher can find inventive, prophetic, and pastorally sensitive ways to connect such occasions to the life of their congregation.

Since 2019, I have sought to foster excellent ecologically focused preaching by teaching an eco-preaching course annually at Yale Divinity School. This course, which had been titled “Preaching for Creation,” draws M.Div. students, students in the M.A.R. in Religion & Ecology and M.A.R. in Practical Theology degrees, and students from the Yale School of the Environment (YSE). YSE students have brought into my classroom their expertise in climate science, dendrology and silviculture, ecosystem management, energy policy, and marine biology. Over the years, several YSE students who made marvelous contributions to our common learning confessed that initially, they had not been sure they should take the course because of “Preaching” in the title, thinking it was designed only for those called to a ministerial vocation as pulpit preachers. So I have retitled the course. Beginning in Fall 2026, the new title, “Earth-Honoring Witness as Public Theology,” will gesture more expansively toward the breadth of ways in which preachers and other public theologians can offer spiritually formative reflections on climate change, ecology, ethics, and belief to diverse communities of conviction.

Measures of evaluation in this course are designed for incremental skill-building. Every student benefits from a one-on-one mentoring session with our superb voice and embodiment coach, Carolyn Ladd. Each student delivers in class a sermon (10 to 12 minutes) and a micro-homily (3 to 4 minutes), the latter an exquisite art form in miniature that requires developing a single compelling theological point with vivid imagery. Each student creates a video response to a book on ecological theology or environmental justice, reviewing the book’s significance for preaching or creating an original artwork (music, painting, photography, poetry) and discussing their artistic process with reference to points from their book. Finally, students craft and read aloud from memoir writing that explores their connection to a particular place in the natural world. Year after year, I am astonished by the richness and profundity of what my students offer in their preaching and memoir reflections for this course.

In my own eco-preaching, I strive to ignite a sense of urgency about responding to climate change. I aim to cherish what is dying—holy work, as every hospice chaplain knows—to make visible the staggering beauty of the natural world, and to invite congregations into a fuller understanding of ways in which Christology, incarnational theology, and ecclesiology are rightly understood as grounded in relationships of loving mutuality. Below is an example of an ecologically focused sermon I preached at three services on April 21, 2024, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in New Canaan, CT. The congregation hosted me at the gracious invitation of their Senior Associate Rector, Elizabeth Garnsey ’05 M.Div., an ecclesial leader passionate about ecological justice. I preached this sermon first for a meditative early service in a lovely chapel, then in an outdoor service where sunlight streamed across the altar and floral scents wafted on the breeze, and finally in the packed main sanctuary in a Choral Eucharist service with magnificent music. 

The congregation of St. Mark’s supports ecological ministry as central to their witness for economic and environmental justice. Since 2009, St. Mark’s has tended a Gospel Garden that supplies over 2,000 pounds of organic vegetables annually to local organizations that address food insecurity. The congregation has an intentional focus on creation care, with emphasis on sustainable living and local partnerships designed to foster the flourishing of all, including other-than-human creatures.

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Sermon: “Let There Be Life!”

Gracious God, You renew the face of the Earth and shepherd its creatures with boundless compassion. Draw us closer to everything You love. Grant us the resolve to protect this fragile Earth and the ingenuity to help it flourish.[1] May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

“In the beginning,” in the velvet dark of infinite possibility before anything exists, God sings, “Let there be light!” (Gen 1:3) And light bursts into being, dazzling and radiant, shimmering across the primordial deep. In that luminous divine light, the waters gather: foaming walls of water tower over the surface as oceans surge into their appointed place. Earth takes shape: continental plates shift, deep trenches split the sea floor, canyons carve the surface of the ground; greenstone mountain ranges and granite highlands and sandstone plateaus emerge.[2]

God sings, and now the green blade rises:[3] wheat and barley and rice, slender white birches and golden aspens and California redwoods, banyans and mangroves and bamboo! The glossy green leaves of olive trees unfurl; the fragrance of apple blossoms and cedar hangs in the air.

God sings, and now living creatures spring up, swimming and diving and hopping, galloping, soaring, and climbing. Innumerable species proliferate in a breathtaking burst of biodiversity: ring-tailed lemurs and Great Horned Owls, meadow voles and cheetahs, Black-crowned Night Herons, timber wolves, and “the cattle on a thousand hills” (Ps 50:10)! God sings, and marine animals glow with blue, green, yellow, and red bioluminescence.[4] Arctic terns and monarch butterflies take flight; African elephants enact rituals of burial and mourn their dead; countless creatures use tools and play and love their young fiercely! And every creature, each in its own unique and precious way, blesses the One who made it.[5]

God sings again: “Let us make humankind in our image.” Divine tears water the ground—tears of joy at all we will create: 

        • gorgeous art and music and poetry,

        • sophisticated sciences and philosophies, 

        • ways to ease suffering, 

        • ways to envision justice! 

Divine tears of joy, yes … oh, but mingled with tears of grief at the terrible harms we will invent: machines that destroy mountaintops, forests, and waterways; technologies to enslave, incarcerate, and annihilate; ideologies that mock Indigenous wisdom, keep families mired in poverty, and inflame hatred of the Other. God laments a future in which our callous disregard for nonhuman creatures will force countless species into extinction and render biomes across this planet uninhabitable.[6]

In the beginning, God said, “Let there be life!”

Four billion years later, there was a man named John who loved Jesus of Nazareth.[7]

John studied the living world around him, and he pondered Genesis 1. The Holy Spirit swept over him, and he wrote these words:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [8]   All things came into being through him…. What has come into being in him was life, and    the life was the light of all people” (John 1:1-4).

John bears witness to a Savior who is Life itself from before the dawn of creation, the all-powerful Word that has sung every thing into existence: 

       This is Jesus: the Holy One who offers living water, “a spring gushing up to eternal life”

               in the hearts of believers (4:10-14).  

       This is Jesus: the Light of the World who shines in every darkness (8:12; 9:5).  

       This is Jesus: the Good Shepherd 

             who calls the sheep of Israel to himself, 

             and calls other sheep also to come home and rest in God’s love.

So, in John 10, our Gospel lesson, scholars wrestle over whether the other sheep belonging to Jesus are the Gentiles {that’s us}, invited into grace through Jesus Christ, or diaspora Jews scattered to other countries voluntarily or through forced migration.[9] Both readings are possible. Here’s the main thing, with Romans 11: we should approach the question of belonging to Jesus with utmost humility, as those grafted into the True Vine (John 15:1-8; cf. Rom 11:17-29) only late in the history of God’s revelation. 

Now: spiritual humility and ecological wisdom alike teach us that it’s time to let go of anthropocentrism—the idea that human beings are the center of the universe. Instead, we can rejoice that all creatures belong to Jesus! When we affirm that “all things came into being through him,” we are making a cosmic theological claim—not only in John 1, by the way, but also in Colossians 1, where it says in Christ “all things in heaven and on earth were created” (Col 1:16). 

We know what is required of human followers of Jesus: belief, the central motif of the Fourth Gospel. John the Baptist came “that all might believe” (John 1:7). The miracles Jesus performs in the Gospel of John—water into wine, healings, raising Lazarus from the dead—are so people may come to believe and, in believing, have eternal life (John 3:15). That’s how we learn to belong to our Savior: we come to believe. But we dare notassume we know how other creatures belong to Jesus!

When Jesus says, “I know my own, and my own know me,” we must understand that within the Christology of the Fourth Gospel (the way the Gospel of John thinks about Jesus), all created things are Jesus’ own. Waterfalls and rainforests and wildflowers testify to him! Yellow warblers and kingfishers, river otters and St. Mark’s Pastoral Pup, Frances: all sing his praises! We express our faith through baptism and creeds, through Eucharistic practice and prayer and Bible study and ministries of compassion.[10] But surely there are infinite ways to belong to Jesus—as many ways as there are creatures in the cosmos! The living community of Earth—everything God has sung into existence, including creatures we have never seen and beings we cannot even imagine—all belong to Jesus Christ. They are his own, and they listen to his voice.

As you tend your beautiful Gospel Garden, as you celebrate Earth Day, 

       you participate in God’s magnificent song of creation. 

You glorify Jesus the preexistent Word, 

       who gives life to everything in the cosmos.

And know this for certain, beloved children of God, made in God’s image: 

       you have been gifted with ingenuity and perseverance and skill

       to cherish and protect the whole living community of Earth!

So wherever you see death-dealing systems that harm human communities or other creatures: resist, dissent, and imagine otherwise! 

• Pray hard, then march for ecological justice for communities imperiled by rising sea levels, droughts, and extreme weather. 

• Read naturalist writing and ecospirituality in your book club.[11] It will replenish your spirit!

• Make a donation to Creation Justice Ministries, The BTS Center, or another eco-advocacy group. 

• Stop eating red meat, or choose not to mow your lawn this May to protect bees and other pollinators.

Everywhere you see exploitation or callous indifference,

        resist, dissent, and imagine otherwise—

        resist, dissent, and imagine otherwise

        for the sake of the world God so loves! (3:16)

In the Name of the One who is Alpha and Omega (Rev 22:13), 

        Light and Life,

        the True Vine in whom every creature finds its fruitfulness:

Jesus Christ, to whom be all glory, honor, and praise, now and forever. Amen.

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Carolyn J. Sharp ’94 M.A.R., ’00 Ph.D. is Professor of Homiletics at YDS. Her research explores the poetics, narrative art, and theology of biblical texts as resources for homiletical theory and practice. She is interested in ways in which preaching can strengthen and nurture Christian community via insights from biblical studies, feminist perspectives on power, ecotheology, and emancipatory pedagogy. Her books include Micah: Introduction and Commentary (Eerdmans, 2025), Jeremiah 26-52, International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament (Kohlhammer, 2022), and Wrestling the Word: The Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Believer (Westminster John Knox, 2010), as well as nine volumes that she has edited or co-edited. An Episcopal priest, she serves as Preacher in Residence at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in New Haven.