Sermons

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.”


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.


The Primeval Mythology of Genesis - The Fall

Genesis 3:8-24

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” The Lord God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

To the woman he said,

“I will make your pangs in childbirth exceedingly great; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

And to the man he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife and clothed them.

Then the Lord God said, “See, the humans have become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now they might reach out their hands and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent them forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which they were taken.

He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.


If ever there was a story in the Bible that has been misunderstood, misused, and abused, it is this one. The story of Adam and Eve, and their leave from Eden, is what many have used to justify patriarchy and the subjugation of women, the explanation and origin of evil, sin, and death in the world, and why sex has long been treated as something shameful and dangerous.

We come to these beliefs and practices by believing that there really were two people named Adam and Eve. And a serpent, who is clearly Satan, tricked the gullible Eve into eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Eve, being the temptress that she was, lured her husband into sampling the fruit, too. Suddenly, they realized they were naked, filled with shame, and ran to hide themselves with fig leaf loincloths. Then God shows up, gets them to confess to their sin, and punishes them both with painful labor: one in childbirth and the other in trying to bring life from the ground, and of course getting pushed out of paradise forever.

And now, every person after can blame Adam, but mostly Eve, for bringing sin and death into the world.

All from taking a bite of an apple…

But what if we don’t have to believe all of those things? What if the text itself doesn’t really support any of that? What if there are a lot more ways to understand the story of our mythical first parents and what it might mean for us today? And more importantly what it tells us about God our Creator.

So first things first - there was no apple. The text just says fruit. What kind of fruit, we don’t know. But I am pretty sure it wasn’t an apple, no matter what popular paintings portray.

Now to something more serious. Did Adam and Eve exist? Two individual people in a perfect garden, from whom the whole human race descended? No—probably not. The archaeological, historical, and especially genetic evidence just doesn’t support that reading.

And that’s where a lot of people start to worry. If that part of the Bible isn’t literally true, then what about the rest? If Adam and Eve weren’t real people—if this is a story rather than a historical event—then how can we trust the Gospels? Or the cross? Or anything else?

That fear is what one theologian called “house of cards theology.” If one part of the story feels shaky, then the whole thing must come crashing down. But that’s a fragile way to approach Scripture. It leads to an anxious, defensive kind of faith—one that clings to literal readings and misses deeper truths.

Yet we must remember, not only when we are looking at these stories in Genesis but throughout the Bible, God doesn’t only desire knowledge, but faith. And faith involves mystery, not certainty.

As for an origin story, this is a sort of an origin, but not one about evil, sin, and death.

Nowhere in the text is the serpent called Satan. Genesis 3:1 says, “The serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal the Lord God had made,” suggesting it too is an animal, created by God. If anything, based on what we know from the previous two chapters of Genesis, all of creation created by God, is good.

What that means for this crafty serpent, I am not sure. Perhaps this is where we lean into God saying that creation was good, not perfect. Perhaps the serpent was good, not perfect, but also not evil. Could it be that even in a good creation, not everything was meant to be simple or safe?

As for death, what rings in our ears is Paul saying, “the wages of sin is death.” So we often assume Adam and Eve were created immortal, and that because they sinned, now we all suffer the consequences—one of them being death.

However, the question of Adam and Eve being created immortal remains open and unclear.

If anything, God’s words in verse 22 suggest something different: “If they eat from the tree of life, they will live forever”—which implies they wouldn’t otherwise.In other words, part of being a creature is death. It is part of the created order. But if the serpent wasn’t Satan, and death wasn’t a punishment, then what about sin?

Sin is certainly central to the story, no doubt. But not sin in the abstract. This is the first instance of sin, so an origin story in that way. Yet the way we often hear this is that because Eve ate the forbidden fruit, all humanity after her is cursed—sin passed down like a hereditary disease.

But such a reading seems a little unfair to Eve and to us.

Afterall, Adam was there with Eve the whole time she was talking with the snake! [pic 3] It says so right in v. 6. He wasn’t off gathering other fruit. He stood silent, passive, seemingly unengaged from what was happening right in front of him. Eve on the other hand, though she is labeled and seen as a temptress, she is anything but.

Really, it is Eve who takes initiative. She rebuffs the serpent when it doesn’t tell the full truth. She makes decisions and is bold. All things we praise men for being, but not Eve. She doesn’t need to act as a temptress because she was clearly already in control. She handed Adam the fruit and he ate, no questions asked. No protest. No discernment. Just silence. Perhaps if Adam had been as engaged and discerning as Eve, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

So if there is blame, it is squarely on both. For not only were they equal in creation, they were equal in sin, too. And just so it’s stated, the story, not before eating the fruit and not after, does not call for men’s dominion over women. As one writer puts it, v. 16 “is not a mandate by God for male dominance but a description of the distortion that now marks human relationships.

A distortion brought by sin.

And what was the sin exactly? We’re told its disobedience - clearly they disobeyed God.

But disobedience is really the result of the actual sin at the heart of this story and the sin at center of our hearts, too. And that is mistrust.

Genesis 3 tells us that we live in a world where there are alternatives to God’s voice, in this case the serpent. And those voices tell half truths and lies that make us wonder if life could be better, we could be better if we just had that thing we are missing.

And we listen to those voices just enough that we begin to doubt not only ourselves, but God too. Creation is good, but not good enough. Perhaps it could be better. I am very good, according to God, but not good enough. Perhaps I could be better.

Maybe the snake is right, I am missing something. And once you believe that, you no longer trust God. And with trust out the window, disobedience is sure to follow.

We all have listened to the talking snake that tells us half truths and lies. If you just had this one fruit, this missing piece, then life would be better. If only I were skinnier or bulkier, if only I had more money or were more successful, if only I had more sex, or a nicer car, or a bigger house, then life would be better. It’s the same voice behind every perfectly filtered photo on instagram, every hustle culture mantra, every ad promising transformation if we just buy, try, or become something more. And finally we could be whole; we could be like God!

But don’t listen to the snake, it's a damned liar, always has been!

No human, no creature has it all. We are good, not perfect, remember? And the tragedy, as one pastor put it, is when we become so obsessive at securing what we think is missing from our lives, we end up losing the garden that was really good from the start.

The good news in all of this is what the story tells us about God our Creator.

Even though Adam and Eve listened to the snake, mistrusted God, and disobeyed, God still clothed them; meaning from the start God has never desired for us to walk around in shame or guilt. God has always desired to cover that for us. Whether it was leather garments for Adam and Eve, or the grace of Jesus Christ that now clothes us in baptism.

God, the perfect Creator, is always covering us with forgiveness and grace, even in our mistrust. Amen.