July 5, 2026 Reflection

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…” I wonder if this passage is one of those that some of us have heard so often that we tend to zone out on about day 3. That’s why I asked Laura, Roger, Sharon and Andra to read, so you could hear different voices speak about the absolute wonder of creation – God’s attention to detail and above all, God’s delight in all of it.

One of the critical parts of the creation story that I think we sometimes miss and I think could bear great hope for us today is that it all started with chaos. ‘The earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.’ One theologian has said that along with the water there was a ‘primordial ooze’, alive with potential. And into that terrifying space of deep, dark water, waded God and over the span of seven days (or an eternity) God spoke an ordered creation into the chaos.

Have you noticed how often we hear or read the word chaos these days – the world is in chaos, there is chaos in the streets with World Cup celebrations, global markets and trade negotiations are all in chaos. How great then to know that chaos is all God had to start with, and yet God was able to pull all this beautiful world out of that dark and murky place. 

 A beautiful rhythm was formed. God speaks. Life emerges. God pauses to notice. And then declares it as good. God speaks and light separates from darkness and God declares day and night good. God speaks and the sun and the moon appear. And God declares them good. The seas are good. The trees are good. The birds are good. The creatures are good.

Notice that God declares creation good long before humanity is given shape. The forests do not exist for us. Rivers are not valuable because we can use them. Every part of creation possesses its own sacred worth simply because it exists within God’s loving creation. This alone challenges much of the way our culture has come to think and organize ourselves. Our economy asks, “What is this worth?” Genesis declares, “This is good.”

Last week at the craft circle Jennifer Crawford introduced a book to me called The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth by Joe Brewer. Brewer is a complexity researcher and transdisciplinary scholar who has devoted his life to helping humanity through the sustainability bottleneck. He argues that we are not approaching planetary collapse, we are already in the midst of what he calls ‘planetary overshoot and collapse’. The climate crisis is just one of 9 boundaries that mark the edges of sustainability, and he says we have already crossed 4 and are rapidly approaching 6. He’s not a doomsayer or conspiracy theorist – his writing is scientifically based and he refers to several sources and further reading at the end of each chapter. He is though, what another writer refers to as a ‘Post-Tragic’ figure, someone who has accepted the reality of where we are at, spent time in the sorrow and trauma of that realization and now, is considering steps that can regenerate a planet that is in collapse. Or, to bring us back to our reading today, be part of a second creation.

Essentially, he asks as God asked Ezekiel while surveying a desert of scattered, dried-up human bones, ‘Can these bones live’? (Ezekiel 37:1-14) And then he offers hope through what he describes as a pathway to regeneration.

Brewer argues that the collapse has come about as humans distanced themselves from the land we lived on. I am terribly oversimplifying here but he argues that in cultures where people live on and off the land, the people and the land often survive. He writes: “The small number of cultures built on assumptions about human separation from (and domination over) the natural world have managed to unleash exponential and cumulative cultural powers that destroy ecosystems at all scales. Yet numerous small-scale societies have had more mixed relational successes with their surroundings. Not all Indigenous cultures are sustainable. But all human cultures that have been demonstrated to be sustainable are Indigenous.” (Joe Brewer, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, p23)

I know when we hear ‘indigenous’ we think of First Nations peoples, who are of course indigenous. But Brewer is using the term in its broader sense. Something or someone is indigenous when it or they originate or occur naturally in a specific place. In the case of a people, there is a deep historical, cultural and spiritual connection to the land, a relationship to the place.  First Nations peoples are indigenous to a place, a land. And birds are indigenous to a land, plants to a particular place. It’s in this context that he writes: “Not all Indigenous cultures are sustainable. But all human cultures that have been demonstrated to be sustainable are Indigenous.”

The writer of Genesis might at this point interject to say, “I told you so.” One of the parts of this morning’s readings that we trip over is the common interpretation of God’s words to humankind: “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Gen 1:28) This passage has wreaked havoc on our earth, and is still used as a justification for doing so. Tragically it has been misunderstood for centuries. As I’ve mentioned other times, the original role of the Lord was not to be a hierarchical oppressor but was instead to offer protection. In ancient near Eastern contexts the Lord or the King’s rule, his dominion, was meant to reflect justice, order, and care for the vulnerable. Given that God created humanity in God’s image, the assumption was they and we would mirror God’s behaviour, God’s compassionate care for all creation. When God gave humanity dominion over all the creatures and plants of creation, they were to steward it, care for it, treat it as sacred and good in God’s eyes. 

Brewer is not religious as far as I could tell, although he is spiritual and he does refer to the Bible on the last page of his book. But his pathway to regeneration has an echo of what is called from us by God. Rather than talk about behaviours as good or bad Brewer says we need to discern between adaptive and maladaptive. Do our actions work towards protecting creation or destroying it? And he writes about the importance of the ethics of being in right relationship with the ecosystems in which our cultural survival depends: ‘…behaviours built on trust, cooperation, generosity and good faith relationships are essential for regenerating the planet.” (p. 42) Pretty much exactly what Paul wrote all those years ago to congregations in conflict.

Theologian Wendell Berry said something similar many years ago: “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world wil. be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”

Brewer goes on to say that these behaviours “…are undermined by scarcity, hoarding behaviours, disenfranchisement, and coercion – all of which have intensified with increasing structural inequalities throughout the colonial and post-colonial periods of human history.” (42)

            Sometimes when I am writing a sermon, I will come across an article or movie or book that speaks so specifically to the Scripture I am focusing on that I am sure that God put it in my pathway – even though my rational, sophisticated mind reminds me that God doesn’t act like that. Joe Brewer’s book is one of those moments, or maybe Jennifer is God. Brewer’s writing in the 21^st Century is mirroring the words of Scripture that have shaped us for generations. Writing, not as a theologian but as a ‘complexity researcher and transdisciplinary scholar’ and still undergirding what God has been trying to tell us all along. We cannot survive without each other, we cannot treat creation like a disposable resource, we must live connected with each other and the planet in respect and love as God has created us to do. We must remember that we are a web of connection, not separate from each other or the rest of creation.

Theologian Sallie McFague has offered a metaphor that the earth is God’s body. God is not limited to the earth, but the earth is the body of God. As such it is sacred, as such it can be crucified. And as such, we have to hope it can be resurrected. I wonder if the work of regenerating a planet that has overshot sustainability is the work of resurrection, and if in this case – we are called to be part of the undertaking. I’m not sure Brewer is aware of the Garden of Eden that was the home of the humanity God created, but at the end of the book he writes: “Yet hope remains for those of us able to think like geologists and behave like gardeners.” To behave like geologists, like people who make a science of knowing the earth, of listening to what creation is saying, and to behave like the creative gardener who spoke all of us and all of creation into being. And to nurture back to life the body of God that is groaning in distress.

Our hope is well-founded because remember, in the beginning there was chaos, and God could work with and in that. May it be so again.

Amen