Jesus says, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” So, basically don’t worry. You can relax about wealth and power. You’ll have all the treasure you really need and no one in the world can steal it. You’re in good hands.

OK, let’s take a flash poll of your stress level after that mini sermon. Thumbs down for the most stressed you’ve ever felt in your life and thumbs all the way up for not even a molecule of stress in your body.

OK, now that we’ve taken a baseline reading, let us really begin and what I thought we’d talk about today is artificial intelligence or AI.

How do you feel about AI?

• Are you learning about it? Keeping track of developments?
• Are you in denial that its coming?
• Do you care or not care?
• For those who care, are you fearful or hopeful?

I’m personally fearful or at minimum deeply skeptical about our tech overlords’, as I lovingly call them, competence, motivations, and their level of care and compassion for normal people. I don’t think I’m alone in my skepticism.

And so, I’ve been listening to various podcasts on AI, trying to wrap my brain around what’s coming. Not only will this be a big change, it is unfolding into a world of existing crises. For example, many people already struggling with feeling a lack of meaning or purpose, which we mostly find or at least aim to express through our work. Here comes AI, which is predicted to cause massive unemployment in the very near future. While some folks say plenty of jobs will be created in its wake, there are others who call this a happy delusion. No one actually knows.

And that’s only one issue among many in the roiling mess of AI. If you listen to AI experts, they say this is a technological transformation on a scale we haven’t experienced since the introduction of agriculture some 12-15,000 years ago and that changed everything.

This week, I listened to a podcast interview of Mo Gawdat, who was for a time the Chief Business Officer for Google. In other words, he knows something about tech. And in his mind, AI will disrupt our understanding of:

• Freedom
• Accountability
• Connection
• Equality
• Economics
• Reality
• Innovation
• Power

Basically, it will challenge our understanding of almost everything in our world. And it will stretch our natural resources potentially to the breaking point. While AI at the moment may seem mostly silly, there’s a tsunami of change and challenge on its way.

If I sound like I’m exaggerating, I assure you I’m not. Take it from Pope Leo. He was inspired to take his name Leo in homage to Leo XIII who helped lead the world through the Industrial Revolution. Our Pope Leo is looking at this time in history as the next time of revolutionary change with AI and he’s already begun speaking on the issue in defense of human dignity and justice. In a world with everything that’s going on, Pope Leo says the big story, the real story is about AI.

Whatever happens, this is going to be a challenge. In the podcast I was talking about, Mo Gawdat said that our future in a decade or two will look either like Star Trek or Star Wars. In one of those movies, there is an evil empire who wants to dominate all of life with extreme technology. In the other one, the main government and society is doing its best to be just and respectful of life through the use of their extreme technology. So, as much as I enjoy Star Wars, the one with the evil empire and Darth Vader, I’d rather live in a Star Trek world. I’m guessing you would, too.

Those are the stakes, or at least a some of them. And the truth is, no one, not the experts or the Pope or anyone else, really knows how this is going to go.

So, how’s that stress level doing now. Let’s see some thumbs, down for very stressed and up for folks still floating on cloud 9.

Let’s get back to Jesus. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

I bring all this up because 1) I believe it’s a very important topic that we don’t really talk about and 2) I believe Christians and other people of faith will have a very important role in guiding this future. These two outcomes, Star Wars versus Star Trek, will be guided not by the technology itself, but by the values we humans bring to our world and technology.

Who is going to champion faith, abundance, love, compassion, inclusion, and the sacredness of life in this new technological era? Palantir? OpenAI?

Or is it us? And folks like us, along with that Pope Leo guy.

As a people, do we:

• Live out of fear or faith and trust in the goodness of life?
• Believe in the sanctity of all life? Of all people’s value and worth? Or do we quietly believe that the world would be better off without some folks here, like Henry Kissinger and his comments about “useless eaters?” (As distasteful as that is to say, the eugenics rhetoric is creeping back in our national conversation.)
• Do we believe in God’s provision? Do we believe that there truly is enough for all of us to be free, healthy, and included? Or do we believe in the lie of zero sum games?
• Do we believe that humans are helplessly prone to a need to dominate one another? Or do we have faith that God can indeed shape us into being courageously loving and committed to justice?

The world may very well need the guidance of brave and bold disciples of Christ now more than ever. In fact, we may have to dig deeper into our faith than we have before to cling to God’s promise of provision and the goodness of Life. All of life, including all of us.

As Christians, we are tasked with knowing these truths and being advocates for upholding these truths. As Christians, we are told to not be afraid but to trust God. Trust life. That’s different than blindly trusting the military-industrial complex when they tell us their new whiz-bang robots will reduce the amount of war in the world. That’s different than trusting our tech overlords when they say that we’ll manage somehow with all our job loss as they rush to be the first trillionaires.

We’re told to trust God and God’s promises for us, as Abram trusted. We’re told to see and trust in the abundance of God and life. We’re told to trust in God enough to extend ourselves and perhaps even risk ourselves for the sake of the poor and marginalized. We’re told to trust that the Kingdom of God is more real, more vital and alive, and more foundational to life and ourselves than the thin promises of our culture. This is the source of our hope and our salvation. The Kingdom is the source of justice, peace, and abundance and it is available to us all.

In the Genesis text, Abram hears God’s promise and yet responds with a lament that God’s promises have yet to be fulfilled. He and Sarai are still childless, despite God’s previous promise. Abram believed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and God “reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Abram let go of the evidence of the world about why hope should not burn in his heart. He turned toward God and this God saw as bringing them into right relationship together, living in hope and love.

The future of our world is being reshaped as we sit here by people who may not share our values of love, compassion, and justice for all people. We may need to be bold in our courageous assertions about human dignity, rights, and our inherent value. We may need to cling to God’s direction to not be afraid, but to believe in the promise that God does indeed delight in giving us the Kingdom.

Mo Gawdat predicts that we’ll go through a period of dystopian abuses of power (12-15 years in his estimation) when the power hungry will have freakishly expansive capacities for control and surveillance through AI. Those storm clouds are gathering. But he also believes in the promise of God’s good Creation expressing itself even through the logic of AI and that this will be its own corrective. (We’ll see, but he is also a man of deep and interesting faith. Who says scientists are all atheists!)

No matter how this technological shift goes, what is clear is that our discipleship matters. Our courageous voices in defense of the powerless matters. Our belief in the abundance of God matters. Our commitment to justice for all matters. Our faithfulness in looking upon the stars in expectation like Abram matters. We may express our faith differently from person to person here, but what we cannot do is look at the world in its brokenness and allow our fear to eclipse our faith in the goodness of God and life.

In all things, in all places, God is present and using what is present to give us the Kingdom. May we believe and live boldly as God’s disciples and champions of the Kingdom for all people.

AMEN