Almost all of my theological pondering begins with the unspoken phrase, “Hmm, but have you thought about...?” the thing to be thought about being an unexamined assumption or unacknowledged consequence of someone’s claim or suggestion. To give you an example, when the Purposes and Principles were first introduced we as a faith community were generally pleased with the poetic language and general tenor of courageous optimism which they implied. But as per usual I had something of a more nuanced reaction, particularly to one of the most widely cherished principles, “respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.” Certainly I have appreciated the intent, and in some ways I have liked the phrase quite a lot. But I have been less impressed by the way the phrase has been used.

While everyone has been intent on celebrating the “we are all connected, we are all family” kind of uplifting positive sense of the phrase I was thinking, probably too much, about the idea of a web. You know, the web that catches insects, the gets in your face when you walk through the woods kind of web. I was thinking about being interconnected, not simply as a joy to celebrate, but as a reality which is sometimes incredibly unpleasant. You see, everybody is good with being interconnected with tribal dancers in the Cameroons, rocket scientists at NASA and Marvin Zindler, bless his soul. But angry mobs in Kenya, the unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and Howard Stern, do we have to be interconnected with them too? Well, I’m afraid the only honest answer is yes.

I was thinking about the interdependent web in which we are caught while reading an article in Science magazine about ethanol. Archer Daniels Midland is very big on using corn as the base for ethanol. You have seen the advertisements for “clean fuel” with a picture of an ear of corn. What could be more American—and hey, it’s environmentally conscious. Of course, some people in the oil patch, admittedly not exactly disinterested observers when it comes to the production of fuel, have a different point of view. So having some oil patchees in the congregation I thought the responsible thing to do was to become familiar with the research about ethanol.

Corn based ethanol, which does produce lower carbon dioxide levels at the tail pipe, because of other considerations, comes at a terrific environmental cost. While the tailpipe CO₂ is reduced the fertilizer used to grow the corn releases airborne nitrogen oxide which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Furthermore, Archer Daniels Midland has received permits to build coal fired power plants to provide the energy to turn the corn into ethanol. Okay, so now we’re burning coal to reduce CO₂? Huh? The disaster doesn’t stop there. Someone thoughtfully wondered how much water it would take and where it would come from to grow the amount of corn to reach the targeted amounts of ethanol production. Without too much effort it was discovered that the aquifers in the Midwest would be rather quickly, and rather thoroughly, drained. Ouch. Then add to that equation the increased nitrogen fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi and the Gulf and you have a vastly increased “dead zone” in which algae multiply so rapidly that all the oxygen for other species is exhausted. Shrimp gone, fish gone. Dead zone. Oops. There is yet another consequence of ramping up the corn production in the United States. Far less soy beans get planted in the United States because of the sudden rush to grow more corn. This means that the price of soy beans goes up. Farmers in Brazil realize there are great profits to be made from soy beans. But because most of the arable land in Brazil is already under cultivation for other marketable crops, they cut down many acres of the rain forest to grow soy beans which North Americans are no longer growing to “reduce greenhouse gases.”

The point here is, of course, that there is no such thing as a wonderfully easy solution. But companies such as Archer Daniels Midland prey on our strong human preference to hope that we will get through this looming problem about transportation fuel. And I can understand the preference for hope myself. After all, there are “looming” stories all over the place. Polar bears, ice cap melting, violent weather and increased forest fires, sea level rising, coral reef bleaching—the ethanol story is only one among dozens of narratives about our environmental crisis. Every time I hear or read one I flinch and I know that if I pay too much attention to these stories the cumulative affect can be very debilitating. I search for nuggets of hope among the debris of bad press.

Sadly and thankfully, I am not built to disregard the bad news. Such stories have been one of the things that keeps me up at night and has been a source of a kind of background low level anguish in my life. Becky and I have two children. I wonder—what kind of world will they inherit? I have a brother who lives in Key Largo Florida and we have friends who live in Miami Beach. What will happen to them as sea levels rise? Indeed, what will happen to us all? Some of you who have known me for years now know that I can get pretty emotional at times. That passion is derived from the depth of my caring not only about my people, but people; and there are times when I do not see how my efforts can make any significant difference on the things that matter most of all. So, sometimes I have been just overwhelmed. I lose my composure and I lose my sleep.

There is another source of late night tossing and turning in my life. It is hard for me not to shake the feeling that the ratio of smiling Cameroon dancers to murderous high school students is not moving in a good direction. When Becky and I led the Turnings service two weeks ago in which we include a brief accounting of the numbers of human beings who met a tragic end in a year someone asked after the service, “Where’d you come up with those gloomy statistics?” Sadly, it is not hard at all. Just google “human mortality”—you’ll see.

Now it may well turn out to be the case that human violence only feels like it is increasing. Any one of you could offer examples of how human beings have been terrible to each other in ages past. And yes some eras in human history have been notoriously bloody. But perhaps what really bothers me is not that this era may be worse than others, but that we have a greatly reduced confidence in our knowing what to do about the violence. So again, I lose my composure and I lose my sleep.

I have titled this sermon, What Disturbs Your Sleep because these two, environmental degradation and sustained violence, are the sort of very daunting concerns that can dance around and around in your head. Perhaps you know how that dance goes. All of you have undoubtedly experienced some sleeplessness over some issue or event. You replay conversations or events in your head again and again. The replay happens because there seems to be no apparent resolution. You are not sure of your own talent or skill to really make much of a difference in the situation.

Now clearly, there are some things over which you have lost sleep which were not worth all the tossing and turning. For some things the smartest thing to do is to take some medication. But is that true of all things? I mention this because medication is what an awful lot of people want. Whether its booze or drugs or any one of a thousand other addictions, people hope to drown out the noise, still the restlessness, and have the bad stuff just drift away, out of mind and out of sight. I mention this because religion is one of the most frequently abused medications in our society.

Understandably so. Life is hard enough. It is a cardinal rule of all preaching, don’t let the congregation go until you see them smiling. And I am acutely aware that you all have to go out there into the jungle for one more week You should receive as much fortifying as you possibly can get.

And I wholly subscribe to that fundamental responsibility to be uplifting. The only problem is, while I know hope is necessary, I believe hope had better be about something that will actually make a difference in the real problems which we face. I have felt that if we cannot capably address these two things, environmental degradation and human violence, our road ahead will not be a good one. There are just too many of us human beings crawling all over every square inch of this planet. We are making too much of a mess and we too easily get into each other’s hair. The combination of environmental degradation and routine violence creates an extremely toxic situation. So is there, or is there not, a positive pathway ahead? Do we just hope for the best? Another way of putting that is, what good is it to butter ourselves up if we only end up as toast?

Yet there is good news. We are hardly helpless. When it comes to the Scylla and Charybdis of environmental degradation and routine violence there is something fundamental which you and I can do, and in fact, must do, in order to improve our prospects for success. Now you might think that I believe we should take efforts such as recycling more seriously. Well of course those kinds of efforts are important. And thankfully there are a lot of people devising an amazing number of strategies that will help us live within the confines of our environment. Becky and I are members of the Mayor’s Green Building Council and at our inaugural meeting on Friday were gratified to learn that significant portions of Houston’s political and corporate leadership are making great strides in advancing environmental well being. So yes, we should all do what we can to reduce our carbon footprint etc., to do something about environmental degradation.

And as for violence? Certainly it is the case that we should continue our strong support for very sensible efforts such as the drug court which does a great deal more to reduce violence in people’s lives than prison can even begin to achieve. Certainly we should always advocate for justice so that the abused do not seethe with revenge.

But initiatives such as these alone will not by themselves really address our situation. That is, I am not sure they go to the heart of the matter. While behavioral changes are important, what I would like us to think about are more nearly spiritual changes. The changes I’m talking about are not in what we do, but who we think we are. Not what a human being does, but what a human being thinks or feels or imagines it is doing. Our future will very likely turn upon, not simply what we do with our feet or our hands, but more profoundly what we do with our heads and our hearts. You see, before the behavior, there is always a thought or emotion that forms the motivation for the behavior. So the equation is simple, change the mind and heart and everything else will follow. Therefore, real hope is possible because both environmental degradation and routine violence can be understood as the consequences of unacknowledged errors in human judgment—but errors that are made just beneath the level of our consciousness. Another way of putting this, our brain makes certain decisions for us but its calculations, of which we are unaware, are fundamentally miscalculations. The brain is an amazing hammer, but not everything is made of nails. All we have to do is increase its versatility. Sure. How?

A place to begin with contemplating this change involves understanding something about the vision of that night heron which Terry Williams so hauntingly describes in her essay. There is that implacable focus of a creature that knows where it belongs. Why does Williams mention this? Because we human beings have mistakenly believed that we are free of our surroundings and that we can deal with our earth and all its creatures, most especially the human creatures, as we so choose. This fundamental error of our thinking leads us to feel rootless. The night heron knows better. So should we.

This feeling of rootlessness creates a false vacuum within us. It is a vacuum because we seek all manner of things to fill up what we experience as an emptiness inside. We seek to fill it up with things. We seek to fill it up with new adventures. We seek to fill it up with what we presume we want from other people. But it is a false vacuum because as much as we try and cram this stuff into there it never gets filled up. Every new thing we get can so easily become part of the background. Every new adventure we have can become a been there, done, that. And other people, well, they have this nasty habit of being and acting like they want to, not necessarily the way we want them to. So despite all this effort to fill in that emptiness there remains this residue of yearning, this sense of dislocation, this sense that, if I just get to that new and shiny place, if I can just get other people to be who I want them to be, then—then I will be satisfied. When? Then!. Now? Well, no.

You see, despite millennia of effort no one has ever figured out how to actually live in the “then.” Where we live is always, simply—now. But living, now, well that is tricky because we are so practiced at avoiding it. We are dislocated and as such unable to accurately see and be where and with whom we are. We don’t know what “Utah” means. And it’s not just that we have practiced so much, but that we have been driven to live this way by our brain’s inner and invisible to us calculations. You could say that our spiritual distemper is an unintended consequences of normal neurological processing. If so, one of our most important tasks is finding out how we can get our biology to back off, to stop pushing us in ways that once worked quite well, but are now causing grave problems.

Thankfully all that pushing us has given us these massive brains which we now can put to much better use than they have heretofore been used. You see, we have become smart enough so that we can truly and profoundly see what tricks the brain is up to. We don’t have to guess or even theorize. We do have to learn some things, and the more we learn, the more we will become adept at knowing our location, the more adept we will see what, in effect, our brain has been hiding from us, the more we will find ourselves more accurately being where we are—now.

What sorts of things must we learn? Well, there is a huge body of information, and it is growing larger by the minute. For instance, linguists have clearly discovered that even though all human beings have a different vocabulary, there is something called a universal grammar. When you stop and think about it, it makes sense. All human beings have roughly the same sort of brain that generates language. Vocabularies differ because of drift over time by people who have become separated and because of our ability to improvise and innovate. Human beings are always coming up with new words but the grammar that drives the construction of speech is hardwired and universal. So now you know why all languages can be translated into each other—because they are fundamentally the same. Yet our brain doesn’t “allow” us to recognize this fundamental similarity. In fact, the brain drives us to imagine the exact opposite, that hearing a different vocabulary is evidence of a sub human creature.

Or did you know that human beings can recognize 2,000 faces but on average remember only 150 names. Oy what problems this discrepancy creates. And you think you hate change? Compared to your frontal lobe consciousness the rest of your brain is dead set against any kind of change. Whenever it sniffs the slightest possibility of a change in its heavily favored routines it gives you a jolt of anxiety—the bigger the change the bigger the jolt. It’s trying its damndest to keep us in line.

There are a thousand other things that we can easily learn about what’s going on between our ears, new things that when understood can help us forge a far more reliable sense of who we are, who we are for each other, and where we all are on this planet. An interesting side bar is the phenomenal role that the internet will play in this unfolding evolution of our consciousness. As per usual, no time for that now—later. But the point is that all these details about the fundamental facts of our consciousness have an incredible potential to help us make substantial progress in that which may be keeping us awake at night. Our brain makes us do “stupid human tricks.” We can stop and when we do we can begin to see real progress through accomplishment rather than medication induced haze.

To me, this is what it comes down to. This morning we had the lovely responsibility of welcoming a beautiful new child into this congregation. Ryan and all the beautiful babies that we have dedicated in this congregation are profoundly worth losing some sleep over. They deserve our concentrated attention and absolute best effort so that the world they encounter will be more peaceful, not less, more beautiful and not less.

One last note about the interdependent web. I began with talking about the feeling that we are caught up in this thing, tangled up in this thing and that being entangles is not always a joy to be encountered. But the relationship goes both ways. You and I are not only caught up in it, it is caught up in us. Not only does it sometimes yank us around, well—we can yank back. We are hardly helpless. What we must do is become the people who will learn how to tug on the strands of that web and thereby become weavers of a grand and glorious design.