The Primeval Mythology of Genesis - Babel and Beyond

John 17:20-23

Jesus prayed, “I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one,

so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

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Artificial Intelligence is not your friend—it’s the Tower of Babel. That was the title of the first article I saw this week while preparing for today. Another headline from a Jewish student paper read: AI: The Modern Tower of Babel. A theme was emerging. Faith publications and organizations are writing incessantly about AI and faith, the church, spirituality, and more.

Then Pastor Mark told me to listen to a segment from 1A this week about AI and faith. It was fascinating—and a little frightening.

I’ll be honest, I thought I had pretty good job security against AI and robots… until I listened to that segment.

I learned about Pastors.AI, a chatbot trained for a specific church using sermons and resources from real pastors. Meaning, you could upload all the videos and manuscripts from Pastor Mark’s sermons over the past 24 years, and the chatbot would generate answers to questions, write sermons, and craft Bible studies—just like he would! You could have your own Pastor Mark in your pocket.

Then there’s Gloo—AI evangelism. Gloo claims it helps churches grow by tracking digital interactions, managing prayer requests, responding to texts, and making new connections.

Entire denominations are diving into AI. If you're Catholic, you can't use just any faith-based AI, so you turn to Ask Father Justin. Apparently, a problem arose where some people preferred confessing to Father Justin instead of their priest. Imagine that… And it’s not just Catholics who do AI.

Episcopalians have Cathy—Church Answers That Help You. Right on the Diocese of Lexington’s homepage, you can talk with Cathy and learn anything you want from the Episcopalian perspective.But what good is the church or denominations if you can just chat with Jesus yourself, AI Jesus that is? If you try that one let me know.

So is AI a threat to the church? Or a tool to help it grow? Is it humans trying to become like God, or is it a resource that makes God more accessible? Is this software a reversal of Genesis 1 where we make God in our image, one chatbot at a time?Is it a new Tower of Babel—our attempt to code our way to God?

How might this ancient story help us with such questions? More importantly, what might it tell us about Jesus?

The Tower of Babel is mysterious. It's short, raises more questions than it answers, and isn't referenced anywhere else in the Bible. Like the other stories in Genesis 1–11, it’s an origin story; one that tries to explain how different nations and languages came to be. Linguists agree though, this is not how languages came about. It much more complicated. As is this story. To read it as only an explanation of languages or cultures misses what all it reveals about God.

It’s also the origin story of Babylon. Thousands of years ago, Babylon made a major technological advance: the brick. They could take bricks, butter’em with bitumen, stack them on top of each other and build.

So the people said, “Let’s build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and make a name for ourselves, or else we’ll be scattered across the earth.” That one sentence is full of so much irony. The tower didn’t reach heaven. In fact, God had to come down to earth just to see it. And when God finds it, God isn’t pleased. Why exactly? We’re not told. What we do know is that God confused their language and scattered all the people—the very thing they were trying to avoid.

That question—why did God do this?—has led to many interpretations, some with harmful consequences.

One interpretation says God scattered the people because mixing cultures, ethnicities, and languages is bad. That view has been used to justify segregation in this country and apartheid in South Africa.But I don’t read this story as the scattering being a consequence or punishment.

God said twice “to fill the earth and subdue”. Well you can’t do that if people are all in one place.

So scattering wasn’t punishment - it was the plan. As were the different languages and ethnicities. Diversity was God’s design from the start.

Another view is that God is suspicious of cities. So, urban life must be prideful or ungodly, while small-town life is holier and safer. But that doesn’t align with the broader biblical story.

God called Jonah to Nineveh, a powerful city, because God cared for its people and animals.

Jesus longed to gather Jerusalem under his wing. Revelation envisions a new heaven and earth—with a new Jerusalem at its center.

God is not suspicious of cities, but is as present there as anywhere else in the world.

And perhaps most pertinent today: some believe God scattered humanity because they were too advanced. Such a reading makes folks skeptical of scientific progress and technological advances like, well, Artificial Intelligence.

But I don’t think God was all that concerned about some bricks stacked a couple hundred feet in the air. Nor is God all that impressed with our towers of today: our advances, systems, or political structures.

And I am pretty sure God isn’t wringing hands over Artificial Intelligence like everyone else seems to be.

What I think God is concerned about is any human attempt to work our way up to God, any effort to work out our own salvation. And we try all the time. We think: “If I just do enough good,” “If I go to church enough,” “If I text with AI Jesus,” or “complete my Bible AI devotional”—then I’ll get to God.

All our technological advances will undoubtedly do a lot of good. But if we think software can save us, it’s no different than thinking a tower can take us to heaven. The tower never reaches.

We can’t code our way up to God.

But the good news of our faith is that we don’t have to go up to God because God came down to us in Jesus Christ. And through that person, that real, divine, tangible person, do we and all the world receive the grace and forgiveness we could never create for ourselves, no matter how advanced we get. Through that person, all the scattered people of the world might be one in him.

That’s what, or really who, holds this community together. We don’t all hold the same views, or come from the same backgrounds, or see the world in the same way. Sometimes it probably seems like we aren’t even speaking the same language. And yet, it is the grace and forgiveness and mercy of Jesus that binds us together as one.

This A.I stuff isn’t going away anytime soon. It certainly has it’s dangers. At the same time it is a technological tool and the church has always engaged with these tools. When the printing press was invited, the church made tracts and pamphlets. When radio came around, preachers broadcasted their sermons across the airwaves.

TVs gave rise to the televangelist. And today nearly everyone watches a service online before they ever step foot through our doors. So it should be no surprise that christians, churches, pastors, denominations, are using A.I. in all sorts of ways.

But like any tool, it can be misused and lead to harm, like thinking it can somehow take us up to God, as an ancient tower once tried. Or that it can bring Jesus down to us.

Yet it can’t do that either, because Jesus came down and is here already. Here at the table where we get our fill of his forgiveness in bread and wine. Here in the waters of baptism where we are washed by his grace. Here in your neighbor, who reflects the very image of God. By his coming down to us, Jesus made his love tangible through these physical signs of his grace that he freely gives to us.

And that’s something A.I. can never give. Amen.

Faith and Technology

Mark 5:21-43

When [Jesus] had crossed again to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him and he was by the sea. Then a man named Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, came and fell before him and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.” So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him.

Now, there was a woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians and was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped and she felt, in her body, that she had been healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus said to the crowd, “Who touched my clothes?” His disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you. How can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” But Jesus looked around to see who had done it. And the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came to him with fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. Jesus said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your disease.”

While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house and said to him, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” Overhearing them, Jesus said to him, “Do not fear, only believe.” And he allowed only Peter, James, and John, the brother of James, to follow him. As he approached the leader’s house, he saw a great commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he entered the house, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead, only sleeping?” And they laughed at him. He put them all out of the house and took the child’s mother and father, and those who had come with him, into the place where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means “little girl, get up,” and the girl got up and began to walk about. (She was twelve years of age.) At this, they were filled with amazement and Jesus ordered them sternly that no one should know about this. Then he told them to give her something to eat.

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I heard an interview the other day with Ray Kurzweil. He’s a computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, inventor, and “futurist.” He was described as Google’s “main AI guy,” too, who lives and works and writes about a world that is relatively foreign to me, except for the fact that it impacts more aspects of my daily life – and yours – than I am often aware of. As a computer scientist, for example, he is involved with stuff like text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. Again, things I don’t understand and can’t comprehend the science behind, but that are part of my daily life in millions of ways. (For instance, I’m not there yet, but my wife Christa, has begun texting exclusively by simply speaking into her phone, rather than typing with her fingers and her phone’s tiny keypad.)

Anyway, according to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil writes books about health and technology, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. From what I can tell, “transhumanism” has something to do with the notion – and likelihood – according to people like him, that in just the next twenty years, we will become something of a hybrid species, where our bodies and our brains will “merge,” as he puts it, with Artificial Intelligence and with the Cloud to the point that, not only will we have more direct access to a vast and growing amount of information, but we will get to a place where we simply have to think about some of the things we currently do – like sending a text message, I suppose – and those things will just happen for us.

This sounds crazy to me. And some of what he’s predicted about it all is downright scary, to be honest. But he’s apparently been studying and making predictions about such technological advances since the late 1990’s. And he’s been right. For instance, he predicted way back then – before the iPhone, before social media, and before Google, even, as we know it – that, by 2029, AI would achieve human level intelligence.

And, think about it, with five years still to go before that deadline … with the fact that you can this morning ask AI anything at all about philosophy, psychology, physics, and even theology, and get solid answers … and with the Cloud doubling its capacity for information every two years … it seems he might be right again, that human level intelligence in something other than human beings is likely – and coming soon.

And what in the world, you might be asking, does this have to do with Jesus – walking and boating and healing his way around Galilee – in First Century Palestine?

Well, I’ve been stewing, for quite some time now, about how surprisingly relevant and meaningful I find the Gospel to be, in general, in light of the way this kind of technology is advancing in the world and in our lives. All of this “Artificial Intelligence” is one piece of it, for sure. I also think about the way “virtual reality” and “remote working” and “distance learning” and “online worship” have become such necessary, meaningful, ordinary parts of our lives of late.

(How many of you – like me – have done any of those things in the last month or so – worshiped online, worked remotely, took a class or attended a meeting via Zoom or something like it? How many of us were doing that as frequently, if at all, just five years ago?)

Well today’s Gospel – and Ray Kurzweil’s predictions – had me thinking about all of this more deeply from a faith perspective.

Again, Jesus is doing his thing… preaching, teaching, healing … being followed around by disciples and throngs of curious, if not devoted, followers … being put upon by strangers to do their bidding … like the man whose daughter is dying and like the woman whose been sick and hemorrhaging for 12 years.

And what if those First Century followers represent a microcosm of the wants, needs, desires, and demands of humanity on the God of our creation. What if Jesus was like a walking, talking, living, moving, breathing manifestation of the hub for healing and hope and answers that God means to be for the world?

Never mind the hypothetical nature of that … Jesus shows today that he WAS and IS the walking, talking, living, moving, breathing manifestation of the healing and hope and answers and salvation God means to be for the world. It’s the theology of the incarnation, after all. Emmanuel … God with us… God among us… On earth as it is in heaven…if you will.

And Jesus does his thing – not from a distance, not remotely, not “virtually” in any way. That bleeding woman knew it. She just needed to get close enough to touch the hem of his robe. And she felt, in her body, that something had changed because of it. And Jairus knew it, too. He approached Jesus, asked him to lay hands on his little girl, and brought him to his home. And Jesus didn’t phone it in. He found the girl, took her by the hand, spoke to her, and told the onlookers to give her something eat, in the end. All of this was as up close and as personal as God’s love always was, is, and promises to be.

Now, at the risk of sounding like a “get off my lawn,” anti-technology, grumpy old man, I find great hope and challenge and call in this, for those of us who want to follow Jesus. For me, it’s why the Gospel is as relevant and as radical and as counter-cultural, for our day and age, as it always has been.

It’s why what we do here together in worship matters – choosing to gather as the body of Christ in a world that is fractured and divided in so many ways, I mean. In spite of our differences, we sing songs, we pray prayers, we make our confession and hear very real words of forgiveness, and we touch the common waters of the baptism that binds us together in the same name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There’s nothing “virtual” about what takes place for and among us here.

It’s why eating bread and drinking wine as part of this worship matters, too. We are fed and nourished in physical, tangible, bodily ways that fill and change us by grace, from the inside out. There’s nothing artificial about the way God’s love comes to us through the sharing of Holy Communion.

It’s why our Stephen Ministry program is such a faithful, powerful expression of care and compassion for those who engage it. It’s one-on-one, face-to-face, in-person sharing, listening, loving companionship for people who need it. You can’t Google that.

It’s why building actual houses that provide real shelter for families in Haiti… It’s why providing actual food that feeds hungry people through our Groceries of Grace food pantry… It’s why crying real tears at a funeral… laughing with real joy at a wedding… offering a hand and a smile when we share the peace… sharing a “Mom Hug” at the PRIDE parade… all of that matters for real.

I’m not saying there isn’t value and promise to be found in all the technological advances coming our way. I’m just saying our faith – and the human love and connection we know in Jesus still matters – and matters more than all of that, in the end. Even Ray Kurzweil, the futurist with all the predictions I mentioned before, acknowledges that AI will never be able to create art, for instance, the way a master artist would do.

I would add, that nothing artificial, inhuman, or disembodied – no matter how full of information it may be – will ever be able to replace the forgiveness, love, mercy, and grace offered by the God we know in Jesus, which means to inspire and compel more of the same from each us …

… you and I, who are called to let ourselves be touched, like that woman who touched Jesus, by the very real needs of our neighbors.

… you and I, who are called to hear the good news of our own salvation – and find ways to share it, out loud and by our actions, with others who need to hear it, too.

…you and I, who are called to be fed and to feed the needs of those around us with very real food and drink, very real love and forgiveness, very real grace and mercy … by our very real presence … living and moving and breathing … as nothing less than the body of Christ … in and for the sake of the world.

Amen