AI and the Sermon
Artificial Intelligence as a Revealer of Our Misunderstandings
I recently saw a rather well known Christian author reply to a Facebook post and make the point that AI (Artificial Intelligence) would soon make the sermon redundant. Redundant! Maybe he was joking. I hope so, but I don’t think so. Maybe I misunderstood what he meant. Again, I hope so but I don’t think so. Even if I did misunderstand him, I’m seeing all kinds of people post about all the ways that AI will change the game. Technology, of course, always changes the game, but often not in the way we think or hope. Anyway, I’ve seen some people in a kind of excited-panicked-rush telling church leaders that they’d better get ready for the multiverse and soon. AI and the multiverse are, in some people’s minds at least, going to change everything and make the church irrelevant if we don’t hurry up and become more technologically savvy. Stop wasting your time – AI is here and about to take over. Act accordingly.
Here’s the thing: what all of this talk of AI is actually revealing, in my opinion at least, is that we don’t understand what we’re talking about. I don’t just mean that we don’t understand AI and its capabilities and limits (though this is undoubtedly true). I mean that we don’t seem to understand the sermon itself. We don’t understand that it is, in more than one way, its own strange and wonderful thing. We, good students of modernity, are so stuck in our heads that we’ve come to think that a sermon is primarily about passing on information. While information may be included in a sermon, we are not, in the first place, proclaiming information. We are proclaiming news. Good news. Today’s good news – meaning that while historical study may be important, the resurrection has happened to time and this news meets us where we are today. I’m not toying with semantics here. Fleming Rutledge is helpful:
It is essential to remember that it was the preaching (kerygma) of the apostles and early Christians that created the church in the first place. Men and women…became converts because of the explosive news that they heard. The apostolic preaching makes up most of the New Testament.1
This news is not a series of strung together facts and words. It is news of encounter – or better, as encounter – with the Living God who is with us in all of his resurrection power and glory as we proclaim this “explosive news.”
There’s more:
“The preacher is handling dynamite; her role is to prepare it and then get out of the way.”2
AI may know how to generate some words, but it doesn’t know how or when to get out of the way. It doesn’t know how to generate silence. It can’t. This full silence is not and cannot be artificially programmed. Rather, it is the space provided for the Living Word to speak before and beyond language. The preacher, interacting with the Spirit and the congregation, may realize at an unplanned moment that the Spirit calls for silence so that the Living Word can speak more clearly. This is a pregnant silence, empty of words but full of God. It is beyond understanding and above words. This silence, of course, includes the silence after the sermon (Rutledge’s point) where the sermon is still, by God’s grace, at work.
Further, and perhaps most importantly, AI doesn’t have a sweet clue who a pastor’s parishioners are. AI hasn’t sat with them in their pain or joy. We preach to people with names, faces, and stories, in a congregation with its own unique challenges and story, and that preaching is, among other things, prayer for these particular gathered people. The preacher bears the weight of the named people that she, and God, love in particular. This congregation, at this time, with these needs, receiving the proclamation that God is with us. Nouwen puts this so well:
Preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is, rather, the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community so that those who listen can says: “you say what I only suspected, you clearly express what I vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my mind. Yes, yes–you say who we are, you recognize our condition.”
When someone who listens is able to say this, then the ground is broken for others to receive the Word of God. And no minister need doubt that the Word will be received!3
AI can’t do this. And AI can’t pray, because there is no such thing as an artificial prayer. Prayer is a living thing. So is the sermon. The sermon as prayer is a real-time conversation between the preacher, God, and the people of God. This prayer also takes place in the writing, not only in the delivery (though the two are not identical). I don’t often cry when delivering sermons, but I cry frequently when writing them. Why? Because in some strange way, these people are carried to the Father during the writing and preaching of a sermon. This is not to say that they are always or even usually named in the sermon, but their burdens, their questions and their joys, commingled with my own, soak every word written and spoken. (Or at least should).
All this to say, my concern is not with artificial intelligence per se, but with an artificial view of the sermon which alone could even hint at the sermon as dispensable or redundant. The sermon is encounter! Encounter with God and God’s people in this moment in which God is fully alive and active.
Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015)
Fleming Rutledge, Means of Grace: A Year of Weekly Devotions, ed. Laura Bardolph Huber (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2021), xvii.
Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Image Doubleday, 1972), 43-44
Excellent! So much human and divine going on all at once as we share Life together.
I have a couple thoughts on this. Leonard Sweet has been talking about artificial intelligence for years now and the challenges it will pose for the church. He writes about needing a theology that will tackle issues as extreme as the desire to be married to an AI object.
AI is no more a threat than televised church to the preacher. It's simply another avenue of gaining information.
This leads to what I am really concerned about and that is that people sit under preaching the void of any anointing and have no ability to discern what they are lacking.