Every Sermon Is Already a Green Sermon — You Just Have to Look

By Rev. Dr. Ambrose F. Carroll, Sr.

We've been preaching green longer than we had a name for it.

Think about every time a Black preacher has called up the image of water — the Jordan River, the Red Sea, the well where Jesus met the Samaritan woman. Think about every time someone has stood in a pulpit and talked about seeds, and fields, and fig trees, and vineyards. Think about the parables built entirely on agricultural life — sowers and soil, wheat and tares, grain and harvest. Think about the Psalms, drenched in the language of rivers and mountains and thunder and rain.

The Bible is a creation document. And the Black church has been preaching from it for four hundred years.

So when I say every sermon can be a green sermon, I'm not asking you to retrofit your preaching with talking points about solar panels. I'm not asking you to work in a statistic about carbon emissions before you get to your close. I'm asking you to look — really look — at the texts you already love, and see what they're actually saying about the created world. Because it's there. It has always been there. The question is whether we have eyes to see it.

The Text Is Already Full of Ground

Here's what I've come to understand about preaching green sermons: you don't have to go looking for them. You have to stop avoiding them.

The Bible is saturated with earth. Creation appears in the first verse of Genesis and echoes through Revelation. The Psalms are full of mountains and waters and the voice of God moving through the natural world. Jesus taught almost entirely in agricultural metaphors: seeds and soil, fig trees and harvests, vineyards and branches. The prophets called the earth to witness, called the mountains and valleys to testify.

When you preach from Mark 4 or Isaiah 55 or Genesis 1 or Ezekiel 34, you are already preaching from texts that are deeply, inseparably entangled with the created order. The question is whether you bring that out or leave it in.

Here's a practical suggestion: when you encounter a text that references anything in the natural world — soil, water, fire, wind, seeds, trees, animals, harvest, drought, famine — pause. Don't rush past it toward your main point. Sit in it. Ask what it means that God chose this image, in this physical world, to carry this truth. That's where the green sermon lives.

And then go one step further: connect what the text says about the created world to what that means for God's people in your community, right now. If the text talks about a land flowing with milk and honey, and your congregation is living in a food desert, that's a connection that doesn't require fabrication. It requires courage.

What Makes It Green

A green sermon doesn't require a green scripture. What it requires is intentional illustrations.

Every sermon has movements. Every sermon has moments where you reach for an example, a story, an image to carry the listener toward the truth you're preaching. In those moments — those illustration slots — you have a choice. You can reach for something abstract, or you can reach for the earth.

You can talk about growth by referencing a stock portfolio, or you can talk about growth by referencing soil and seasons and the way a seed has to die before it can produce something alive. Both work. But one of them reminds your congregation that they are part of a created world that God called good. One of them calls them back to their ancestral relationship with the land. One of them plants something that may grow long after the service is over.

Here's the most impactful thing your congregation can hear: find the environmental justice success stories. Find the people on the frontline — the ordinary people in small communities who held the line against a petrochemical company, or cleaned up a poisoned river, or built a community garden on a vacant lot — and let them become illustrations. Let the movement find its way into the manuscript.

Because when we preach, we are not just explaining scripture. We are telling people who they are and what they are called to do. And if we never tell them that they are people of the earth, connected to the created order, responsible for its care, empowered to affect its healing — then we have left something important out of the gospel we preach.

What Silence from the Pulpit Says

I want to be direct about something, because I believe it too much to soften it.

If you are pastoring a congregation right now and you are not addressing what is happening in the environment — if you are not speaking to Cancer Alley and food deserts and the flooding in communities that can't afford to rebuild and the air quality that's giving our children asthma — your people notice. They may not say anything. But they notice.

They notice whether you seem numb to it. Whether you seem uninformed about it. Or whether you seem afraid of it. Those are three different problems, but they all have the same solution: engage. Read. Stay current. Not just with your theological journals, but with what's actually happening in the communities your congregation lives in. The great preachers always said you've got to read the newspaper. You've got to know what's going on in the world you're preaching to.

Because here is the truth: climate change is not a future problem. It is a current-events story. It is the headline your congregation is already living inside of, whether they have language for it or not. And you have a pulpit. You have the word. You have a tradition that has always found a way to name what is happening and call people to respond.

The Black prophetic tradition has never been silent in the face of an injustice that was killing people. This one should be no different.

Go Plant Something

There's one more I've realized from my years of study and observation that haven't been able to shake. When you preach from texts about the ground, about soil, about things growing in the dark, you starts to realize how we're all connected: the people, the plants, the trees, we all came from the soil. So the text says God loves the people — God loves the land too. It connects in ways that you don't have to force.

That's the permission I want to give you today.

You don't have to force it. You don't have to manufacture a green angle on a text that doesn't have one. The connection is already there, woven into the fabric of Scripture, because the God who inspired it is the same God who spoke the created world into existence and called it good. Your job is to preach that whole God — not just the parts that stay safely inside.

Go back to your text this week. Find the ground in it. Find the water. Find the seed. And when you find it, don't skip past it. Let it breathe. Let it preach.

Because every sermon is already a green sermon.

You just have to look.

Be the revival.

Learn more from Rev. Dr. Carroll, and hear the call to serve the land as Revivalists. Preview the first chapter of his new book, Green The Church, available now. Sign up to receive your free Chapter 1 preview when you visit greenthechurch.org/book, and see why others are calling the text "A prophetic blueprint for the future of faith and justice."