I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
Romans 12:1-8
Many of us don’t quite know what we think about AI. What is an ethical use of it? How much is too much? I know we have environmental concerns, too, but it’s not just about that; a recent poll suggests more Americans would be comfortable with a coal plant being built nearby than an AI data center. Of course we may not want either, but nobody feels threatened by a coal plant in the way that AI can make us feel threatened as small and replaceable. And yet despite our ambivalent-at-best feelings, it seems Americans are using AI more and more.
Someone in our Estuary discussion group asked me if I was worried about AI replacing God—and no, God’s going to be just fine. I’m not really worried about Artificial Intelligence challenging God as much as I am about AI as Artificial Intimacy changing us. People say it’s “just a tool,” but we more and more turn to it as a quasi-therapist, imaginary friend, an empty encourager, a faulty teacher, and yes, some share so many thoughts with it that they kind of forget it’s not God (doesn’t help when some of the companies seem to literally believe they are building God). AI can be like our own personal god who just needs a little help getting to know you. But once they do, they are custom-fit for you based on how much you tell it. Movies like Her from 2013 with Joaquim Phoenix predicted this exactly, when a man falls in love with the AI voice in his ear that knows him more than any other person possibly could.
I do not have clean hands here. I use AI in research, to organize my notes and double-check my thinking, and now when I Google things whether I like it or not. But I never ask AI to generate sermon ideas or write any parts of my sermons for me, not because I’m special—or even because it benefits you, really (sorry)—but because the process is too intimate for me. About every week, at some point I go on a long walk past the farms near us, feeling closer to God in my body as I walk through the glory of creation…then like a madman, I ramble audio recordings into my phone of what the readings are calling to mind in my walk with God this week. What makes preaching special to me is not giving you the most optimized and efficient sermon on Romans 12 today. What makes it special is that I am the member of our community you have tasked with publicly sharing a piece of my relationship with God with you in a way that I hope illuminates the text and helps the Word come alive for you…and doing that is just an intimate thing. I don’t want interference in that. I want sincere connection.
When I come across AI writing, I just feel the offense as a reader, an intense disconnection, because it wasn’t the intimacy with a person that our whole lives we have come to expect from writing and speaking to each other, but there was something strange in between. The connection we had has been replaced for efficiency.
Artificial Intimacy can also give us the illusion that we can replace each other. And while we may “only” use AI as a tool, tools work in both directions; a new farming technology does not only transform the land, it transforms the farmer. Then, as we’ve seen, it replaces the farmer. Yes, farming is much safer and more efficient…for the farmers left.
But today, the apostle Paul tells us a different way. “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” (Rom 12:5) We do not just belong to God; we belong to each other. We are to know each other like your hand knows to scratch your left shoulder before you even register an itch. A shoulder can’t scratch itself.
Of course, we can’t control how new technology and the complex incentives that come with it will transform our society. It will transform industries, eliminate some jobs, and leave people feeling even more replaceable. The human instinct is so often to treat each other as replaceable even without technology. But there is at least one place where we are called to resist that. We’ve always been called to it.
But the early church was a hot mess. They didn’t have the New Testament. They didn’t even have the Old Testament as we know it now, though they considered much of it their Scripture. They had the culture around them, “this age,” the times that they were a product of. They had each other—oh, whether they liked it or not, they had each other, and some even began working together and sharing all things in common. And they had the good news of Jesus Christ, that he had died, risen, and would come again. And so they tried to look at everything in life through those resurrection eyes together. With nothing more than faith in Jesus Christ, they studied the Scriptures together, worshiped together, ate together, and lived as one body that loves and respects and uplifts every single member, no matter how broken or thrown away by society or simply annoying they may be, everybody has a part in God’s story, and we are all called to help each other as if what happens to you is also happening to me.
Up to this point in Romans—a letter that some have posited cost Paul around $2000 in our money, an expensive little letter—Paul has laid out the gospel: we’re all sinners in need of grace, nothing saves apart from faith, God always loves us no matter what, and God is not leaving anybody behind without mercy. Christ is risen! But what do we do about that now?
When we read Romans 12:1-8 again tabove, it might feel like these are disjointed thoughts. But it all flows from the same gospel: what do we do now that Jesus is risen, and sin doesn’t have to be our boss? What does a life in the Spirit actually look like in resurrection eyes?
It looks like being a “living sacrifice,” as in, on fire for God but not burnt up, not martyred for his grace, because sin is defeated. We don’t need to defeat death with more dead flesh. So we offer ourselves to him continuously while staying fully alive. But we also offer ourselves to each other, and then we are sent out into the world to help however we can, not in the same way, but only as we as individuals can together. Loving people in the world but not conformed by the world, formed by the Spirit renewing our minds, discerning in “sober judgment” what things are of Christ and what are the wages that go back to death. In the gospel, we become humbled by the grace we’ve been given, because we are not so good that we need no mercy, and we are no better than anyone else, for “we are members one of another.”
And the more I chew on this passage, the more I hear that word again: intimacy. Not sexual intimacy with most people—and there’s a whole other sermon there about how human beings use sex also as artificial intimacy—but intimacy is the real deal sauce of relationship, truth in God expressed in truth with each other. The body of Christ is called to be spiritually intimate with one another, which we can only do because God is truly intimate with us. In Psalm 139, we hear how much God knows every single thing about you, what you’re going to say before you say it, he searches you and he knows you and loves you. For the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, she was stunned that Jesus knew every single thing about her. That’s the intimacy between God and us.
Between each other, true intimacy gives each other whatever gift we have, whatever we have to offer, whether it’s the last coin of a widow or a spare donkey or a place where someone can eat, in our prayers for each other, the small-talk with someone you barely know, our best moments and our worst, our deepest fears and our pettiest judgments, our greatest joys and silliest preferences, it’s all intimacy. To live in the light of the gospel is to trust that you really have been reconciled to God for good, and anyone reconciled to God is reconciled with each other.
You may or may not know the story of Ruth, but here’s a refresher. Ruth and Naomi were not supposed to be kindred spirits. In the time of the Judges, an extremely selfish period of Israel’s history, Naomi, an Israelite, loses her husband. She just has her two boys, one of whom marries Ruth, the other marries Orpah, two non-Israelite women. And then their husbands die. Now they are just three women with no legal obligation and no ancestral loyalties to each other. Naomi tells them to move on with their life and she will go back home to Israel. Orpah says okay. But Ruth says, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” (Ruth 1:16-17) Ruth said No, Naomi, you are not replaceable. We belong to each other, and we belong to God.
If you claim Christ, you are part of a body whether you like it or not. There is no such thing as being a Christian who is not part of the Church. You may not go to a church, but if you profess faith in Christ, you are part of the body, and you are needed. If AI replaces us for each other—not just in tasks, but in connection and meaning—then we are no longer a body with members who know each other. A healthy body honors the individual and the whole. If the group discards the lost sheep, it stops functioning as the body of Christ. If we as individuals believe that we can do it on our own, we are no longer living in Christ either.
It is true, though, that anybody who has ever been in church two Sundays knows that we have not always figured out how to be authentically intimate with each other; we’re in New England after all. It takes time. People mess up. Intimacy brings trust, and trust gets broken, and that brings greater pain than if we had stayed away. That makes it harder to begin again. Look left and look right and see that everyone, in some way, is broken and wounded. And if you look behind me as I preach, you’ll see the empty space left by the broken and wounded body of our Lord. We are his body. And when we feel our wounds most heavily, it may make us want to just not be with anybody anymore altogether because the tax of the pain of intimacy is too great. So we put on a smile, bunker down, and shield ourselves. And maybe we seek intimacy in false ways and simulate it through machines.
But the body of Christ cannot afford to be falsely intimate with each other. If it is Christ’s body, we are called to be intimate with each other and the suffering of the world through our Lord Jesus, from whom there is nothing to hide. He knows your inmost being better than even you do.
And in his church, nobody is replaceable. Your gift matters, no matter how small. You are wanted here, and you are needed here.
We say AI is “just a tool.” The cross was also a tool, a tool used to separate a person from their life. A tool of human eyes that sees other human life as disposable. And so God used the tool of disposal to tell you that there is nothing that can replace you in the eyes of God. He looks at you with resurrection eyes. Let us see each other through them too. Amen.
