“Broken Creation Care”
From Broken Together Lenten Sermon Series
by Rev. Suzanne Calhoun, Nevada City United Methodist Church
California-Nevada Annual Conference
Preached March 8, 2026
Scripture: Genesis 1:1-2:3
Video available on YouTube Channel
NCUMC Church @nevadacitymethodistchurch
As we come to the place of broken creation care in our series, we are moving this week from the ways that we personally are broken, the ways that community is broken, to the ways that certain things about the world that we share globally are broken. And I thought that the Earth itself was a good place to start, because I often think it is the place for me in my life history where I find the most hope.
So, for those of you that don’t know this about me, my undergraduate degree is in wildlife biology, and I went to college specializing in ecology and genetics. And we can have a whole other conversation about how I ended up here in front of you preaching today. But I have always found hope in the innovative things that people are doing around ecology.
I’m in my 40s. For my entire life, people have been talking about reducing, reusing, and recycling. 40 years of that, it’s made a difference. Think about the ways in which the boom after World War II in this country created mass consumption, created the ways in which we would replace things instead of repair things, and created a system where all of that went to the landfill when we were done with it. And now it doesn’t all just go to the landfill. Not that there isn’t any more we can do, but I find hope in that.
I find hope in the fact that we are having conversations about how what we put in our bodies and in the water supply affect other creatures on the planet. I had the opportunity when I was doing my undergraduate work to go to the University of Alaska Fairbanks for a short time on a student exchange program from California. I listened to researchers who were dealing with the fact that the hormones that we put in our bodies and put in the water supply were preventing polar bears from reproducing. And as that information came out, people started making different decisions, primarily along the lines of their birth control choices, to reduce the amount of hormones in the water. I find hope there.
I share these things to say that I think even though we’re looking at brokenness, we have to look at where we have come together to make a difference in the things we identify as broken. Think about this for a moment.
Where have you identified a way in which creation, the Earth, some aspect of ecology is broken and made a different choice? Or have you?
Do you know someone who’s making a difference in the area of being good stewards of God’s creation?
How often do you hear somebody connect creation care and stewardship to that?
Because I will tell you, in my childhood, I never heard it, but I hear it a lot today. And I find hope there.
I find hope in places where people are stepping out together across the barriers of religion into community and social justice in other aspects of society and banding together to make a difference about what we would call creation care. And if you are unfamiliar with some of those examples, they will appear on the bulletin board next week. So, take a look at them because I’ve got a stack of paperwork that people have already provided me because these things are already happening.
My question to you this week about broken creation care is, how does taking care of the Earth connect to your faith? And how can you articulate that to someone in the community that may not share your faith?
Because I think that’s where the church on the concept of creation care has fallen short, where we are a little bit broken as people of faith. I think we are often scared to share that faith connection with which many of us identify.
So let me go back to my personal story of how I came to study ecology and genetics in my undergraduate degree. See, when I was a junior in high school, I went on a mission trip in another denomination that I was part of at that time where I visited the only church in that denomination in the Western region that had a female pastor. And I thought I might be called to ministry or mission work or something. I had a conversation with her, and she said, “I wouldn’t wish this life on my worst enemy.” She had had such a hard time finding a church that would take her as a female pastor in the ’90s. And I thought, “Okay, God, what else can I do to make a difference?” Because clearly, this is not the path.
And I kept coming back to the love of nature and creation that my grandfather had instilled in me over the years. I want to tell you something about my Grandpa George. At 80, we told him he couldn’t go backpacking alone anymore, that he’d have to take one of us with him.
And somehow, being the oldest grandchild, I was the nominated entity. And let me tell you, that 80-year-old could hike so fast I could hardly keep up. But he taught me about the importance of not disturbing what you’re enjoying in nature. He taught me about the importance of feeling connected to the Earth in a way that you could navigate by the sun and stars. He taught me about why sitting still in nature and taking in everything around you was as spiritually important as sitting in a pew. (His wife was the organist, and he did a lot of sitting in pews.) And I thought, well, maybe my love of nature is a way that I can still serve God by doing something that helps preserve creation. So, I went to school thinking I wanted to work with threatened and endangered species and to educate people about that. And I did those things. Earlier in my adult life, I spent a lot of time doing those things. I learned a lot about population ecology. And let me tell you, the population dynamics of churches are not all that different from population ecology.
But here’s the thing. When it came to articulating why I wanted to leave that side of my life at a pause and go on in ministry, I described my generation, who are now 40 to 50-somethings, as the endangered species of the church. I talked about the way that my generation said the church wasn’t doing anything about X, Y, and Z, so why would they be a part of it? I talked about the way in which I thought we had missed an opportunity of faith to connect something that was essential to my generation who grew up reducing, reusing, and recycling to the faith that Jesus taught. I talked about the way in which our creation stories, in all honesty, are not unlike many creation stories of peoples who have lived in harmony with the land for years. And somehow, as Christians, we forgot about that. I talked about the connection to everything I’d already done in my life and my grandfather’s love of nature, my desire to make a difference, and my understanding of ecology and faith together.
And I’ve gotten to thinking over the years because for me, college was a long time ago. My kids are now in college, and we still haven’t put those things back together. We still haven’t taken our bits and shards and broken pieces of what we know other groups have done to take care of the land and live in harmony, what technology makes possible today. And even though they don’t quite match, we can put them back together to make some semblance of a whole.
We also haven’t done that with what we know good stewardship of the land is and how we live our faith today. And yeah, it’s not perfect. They’re not the same geode. They’re not part of the same rock. But there’s a surprising thing inside both of them that is absolutely beautiful. And if you ask me, would be even more beautiful combined.
So where are you finding hope in care of creation, in the brokenness that you see? Where are the possibilities of growth, of repair, of connecting your faith to what you know the Earth needs, of connecting your faith to the stories of creation around the world and throughout the ages, of how it is that the broken creation care that we’ve all grown up experiencing can begin to mend?
And how are you going to be a part of that?
Amen.