a Sermon on Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been grateful for the work of Pope Leo XIV, who released a major writing called an Encyclical, titled “On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

AI has been on my mind only sporadically in recent years. But as large language model AI agents have become accepted tools in many industries – including ministry and in education – I’ve become more and more uneasy about how they do, and how I want them to fit into my life. And recently, that uneasiness has grown as news stories come out about communities pushing back on the mind bogglingly huge data center projects that they justifiably fear will drain water and electricity resources from an already-squeezed human ecosystem.

In real ways, AI has already radically changed our world.

What’s noteworthy about Pope Leo’s encyclical are its tone and scope as much as any specific recommendations it gives about AI. In an age of influencers who play to the lowest human attention span denominator, using divisive rage to manufacture clicks, it inspires confidence whenever anyone uses a big platform like the Pope’s to say something that’s grounded in history, nuanced, and level-headed – something that seeks to add to an ongoing conversation rather than to slay, defame, or delegitimize anyone with an opposing viewpoint.

The Pope’s encyclical on AI is just a well-researched, rational position on a topic that is at the center of where humanity is currently headed, grounded in faith. And it’s framed by a question that’s surprisingly easy in our world to lose sight of: who do we want to be as humans?

Will you pray with me? Holy One, we open ourselves to you now. We breathe together, and as we do, we bring our focus to the present moment, the inhaling and exhaling of a single breath. It is difficult to quiet the internal and external voices constantly vying for our attention. Help us to be still, we pray. For in the stillness lies compassion. In the stillness lies wisdom. Breathe in, breathe out. Amen.

In today’s passage, Jesus gains one disciple, debates one pharisee, and performs two miraculous healings. Any three verses of this passage could be sermon material, but to tie the whole passage to the topic of artificial intelligence, I’ll note that one thing they have in common is that each brief event contains a paradigm shift – a new way to encounter reality. A tax collector leaves his exploitative job to follow Jesus. A pharisee sees a rabbi dining with riff raff and says, This doesn’t fit the story of who a rabbi should be around. An ailing woman and a grieving father, both deep in seemingly irreversible suffering, put their trust in the impossible power of Jesus’ touch. And a crowd laughs at Jesus’ assertion that a girl is merely sleeping, only to see the ridiculous become reality.

Four tiny tests of the same question. Which holds more weight: what you’ve been told by the authorities (whoever they may be), or what you observe with your own eyes?

We hear each character make their choice. The pharisee and the crowd cling to the facts and what they had been taught about how the world works; Matthew the tax collector, the woman, and the father let go of what they thought they knew because they believed what they saw Jesus do.

This question of who has control of the stories dictating our lives and whether we are going to assert ourselves in their face is at the heart of the Pope’s encyclical. In its introduction he writes, “In recent years, it has become increasingly evident how rapidly and profoundly digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming our world… The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination… In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good…

“For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”

If you’ve ever used Chat GPT, or Copilot, or other AI tools, you know AI’s allure. You type in a question or a command to create a workout plan, or a vacation itinerary, or a research paper, or an image, and in milliseconds, your desired thing materializes. You’ve saved the time it would take to research and create that thing. It’s truly amazing. The story that AI companies tell us – that AI makes us smarter, more efficient, happier even – feels true when we receive that answer in the blink of an eye.

But like so many things that are heavily marketed to us, there is so much that goes unseen and unquestioned in our rush to productivity and ease. What sources were used to produce that research paper? How were those sources chosen, and by whom? Were the original authors compensated? Back on the server farm where that AI bot lives, how much electricity and water did that one task consume? Where were the rare earth minerals that went into those AI servers mined, how dangerous was the labor, and what was the toll on the environment? What did we miss out on by handing over that intellectual work to a black box somewhere in the cloud?

Who is profiting from that short cut we just took? Who wants all those questions hidden in the black box in the cloud?

Like the low introductory APR, the free overnight shipping, or the authoritative tone in the YouTube influencer’s voice, the giving over of our authority to stories like what we hear about AI that promise more free time and cost-free knowledge distract us from asking all the inconvenient questions that would reveal the things about empire that we don’t want to see, and so often don’t from our perspective of white, Western privilege. We don’t ask, because we’re busy, and the ease feels so good. Meanwhile, we import efficiency and export exploitation, injustice, environmental destruction, and dehumanization.

Pope Leo reminds us that the rise of AI is still in progress, and that we all have agency to decide where that rise will lead. As he observes, new technology has the potential to improve countless peoples’ lives; it could also consolidate power in fewer hands and exacerbate inequality, ultimately causing more harm to peoples’ lives than good.

As people of faith – as people who believe in the healing power of Christ, which manifests in the messy face-to-face of human experience, not in the intellectual pursuits of rightness or efficiency – will we see not only what the marketers want us to see, but the whole supply chain, the whole story? Will we slow down and ask the hard questions? Will we find courage and beauty, not danger, in limitations? When a choice comes up between the seemingly cheap and easy versus the slow and complicated, will we stay present to our own broken humanness and remember the world’s marginalized before treating discomfort like an existential problem to escape?

God’s commonwealth awaits our answers. May we breathe. May we believe our eyes, especially when what they see reveals inconvenient truths, and may we allow our human stories to be changed. And may our actions be righteous, revealing our love of God and our love of all our neighbors as ourselves. Amen.