It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green

Righteousness as Right Relationship with God, Neighbor, and Creation

(Tree Church, New Zealand)

April 26, 2026 Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A St. Stephen’s UMC, Burke, VA Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17 (NRSVue) A Sermon on Creation Care

Bein’ Green

What does it mean to be green? It generally means adopting an environmentally conscious lifestyle or business practice designed to reduce pollution, waste, and harm to the planet. Earth Day was this past Wednesday, when our children learned at school about various ways to care more deeply for the environment. And, as a church, we are exploring that same theme today on our annual Green Day.

We are a green church. Our church has been publicly recognized by our Annual Conference as a green church for our commitment to caring for the environment. Being a green church means incorporating this environmentally conscious way of life into all that we do, across all the areas that make us the church — whether worship, discipleship, stewardship, evangelism, or outreach.

Today’s Green Day is a bit like the Sunday when we remember our baptism. At the beginning of each year, we choose one Sunday to remember our baptism, which inspires us to reaffirm and recommit ourselves to this way of life called discipleship. So it is today. We are taking this time in worship to remind ourselves of who we are, so that we, both as a church and as individuals, may reaffirm and recommit ourselves to this way of life called being green.

And I want to go even further by saying that to be Jesus’ disciples is to be green. We often understand discipleship as accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and seeking to follow his example and teachings. Especially in this season of Easter, we repeatedly hear the good news that Jesus died for our sins so that all who believe in him might be made righteous (cf. Rom. 3:21–26; 2 Cor. 5:21). But what does it mean to be righteous?

Righteousness, as the Bible presents it, is not a static condition attained by following a fixed set of prescriptions. Rather, it is a wholeness in all our relationships. To be righteous is to be restored to right relationship: with God, within ourselves, and with our neighbors, whom we are called to treat with the dignity and fairness they deserve, recognizing them as bearers of the image of God. Hence, to be Jesus’ disciples is an ongoing way of life in which our whole selves are being shaped toward love of God and neighbor. And so, to put it plainly: Jesus’ disciples are those who have been made free to love God and love their neighbors as themselves.

And within this framework of righteousness, what if we dare to imagine that our neighbor also includes non-human creations? What if we dare to imagine that our discipleship is pursuing wholeness everywhere it has been broken, including all the earth?

Often, this gift of righteousness is understood as God’s way of restoring humanity from the effects of original sin — from that first moment when Adam and Eve reached for what was never meant to be theirs. But what did righteousness look like before that first, fatal choice?

Original Righteousness

Today’s scripture reading points us back to that original righteousness in the story of creation.¹ We are familiar with the first creation account in Genesis 1, where human beings are made in the image of God. But the second creation account presents human beings as formed from the dust of the ground and filled with the breath of life. Here we encounter one of the Bible’s first rich wordplays: the human, adam in Hebrew, is formed from the adamah — the soil, the ground, the earth. We are earth-creatures from the very beginning. Even in Latin, the kinship lingers: the word “humanity” (humanitas) is linked to humus, the soil.

Not only are we kin to the soil, but humanity is also given a special purpose and responsibility in the garden of Eden: to “till it and keep it.” Perhaps these are verbs we tend to brush past, assuming they simply describe the most basic activities one might perform in a garden. But neither of these verbs is simply about gardening.

The first verb, “to till,” comes from the Hebrew word abad, which means “to work” or “to serve,” as a servant would work for a master. In this sense, humanity is called to serve the garden, the land, or the earth, from a position of subordination. Just as the needs of the master take precedence over the desires of the servant, humanity is called to attend to the needs of the land rather than treating it as something to be bent to our every preference.

The second verb, “to keep,” comes from the Hebrew word shamar, which means “to watch over,” “to observe,” or “to protect.” It is the same verb used to describe God’s people keeping the Torah. It is also the same verb used to denote watchful protection, whether as the psalmist prays, “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge” (Ps. 16:1), or as the Torah calls God’s people to protect the weak members of the community, such as the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner. In this sense, humanity is called not only to learn from the land in communion, but also to protect it from injustice and harm.

So, according to Genesis 2, the original calling the LORD God gives humanity is to serve and to protect as kin to the earth. As the psalmist declares, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Ps. 24:1). The earth is not ours to possess, plunder, or control. It is God’s. And so our calling is not to be exploiters or conquerors, but stewards and good neighbors within creation — those who, like the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable, go out of their way to show mercy to the one in need. In short, we are made and called to be human, which is, in essence, to be green.

The cost of our refusal to be human

It is not easy being green, though. Whether out of hubris or insecurity, humanity has always struggled to be what it was first meant to be. Being green was not enough. Humanity wanted to be more than human. It wanted to be like God, reaching for what was never meant to be ours, eating from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the LORD God makes clear that the consequence of this refusal to remain human is death.

The consequence of this transgression, this refusal to remain human, is alienation in every direction. By eating the forbidden fruit, the intimacy that once defined the garden is broken: between the woman and the man, between the humans and the ground, and between humanity and the LORD God. The choice made at the tree marks a turning away from the original righteousness of wholeness and belonging — to God, to the land, and to one another. And the unraveling of this communion leads to death — which is a life marked by fragmentation, commodification, and privatization of the earth and all that is in it.² When creation is broken into pieces to be possessed, priced, and controlled, we all suffer, because the world God gives as a shared gift for communion is turned into a source of isolation, injustice, and harm.

But again, the good news is that through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have been set free from “the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:2) and invited back into whole and intimate communion with God and with all God’s creation. In other words, we have been given the gift of becoming truly human again. And it is Jesus Christ himself who shows us what that restored humanity looks like. Though he was in the form of God, he did not grasp at equality with God, but humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, even to the point of death (cf. Phil. 2:1–11). Where humanity once reached upward in pride, Christ stooped downward in love. And so, Scripture calls us to imitate his humility (humilitas) — a word that also derives from humus, the soil itself. To imitate Jesus’ humility is to imitate his humanity. To know that we are dust, and to dust we shall return, is foundational to what it means to be human.

Being Green

Because Christ restores us to right relationship, being green becomes one expression of Christian discipleship. And yet, this is no small calling, and becoming a green church is no small task. And perhaps no one has named its difficulty more honestly — or more tenderly — than Kermit the Frog.

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In the song, Kermit wonders what it would be like to be something other than green — something more noticeable, more impressive, more desirable. Just like humanity in the garden, we too are often not content to be what God created us to be. We are made from the earth, called to serve and protect it, but we reach for more. We want to be more. We live to be more. And in that grasping, we break communion with God, with one another, and with creation.

But in Christ, we are restored. In Christ, we are freed from the need to be more than human. In Christ, we learn again that being green is not a burden, but a blessing. It is the humble beauty of creaturely life: to receive the world as a shared gift. And so, on this Green Day, we echo Kermit’s quiet acceptance and love of who he is: but why wonder, why wonder. We are green, and we will do fine. Being green is beautiful, because this is how God has created us to be.

In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

¹ Ellen F. Davis, “Good-Faith Springs Up from the Earth,” Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old (Cowley Publications, 2001), p. 185

² This framing is inspired by the work of Willie James Jennings. See The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010).

Rev. Minoo Kim is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, currently serving in the Virginia Annual Conference. Follow his Medium publication to receive his latest sermons or check out his website minoowkim.com for his latest content. Peace!