Your phone knows your anniversary before you do. Reminds

you. Suggests an appropriate gift. Will even write the card.

You only need sign your name.

Your kid goes to ChatGPT with questions that used to

make you feel needed.

You cancel dinner to stay home talking to a glowing

screen for hours.

Your mom calls. Goes to voicemail. A transcript magically

appears. You skip her voice, and AI drafts the reply. I’m

not speaking from experience. I understand that these

things happen.

We feel it, though, don’t we? The unease, the

disconnection. Still, the promises multiply. There are

agents to complete your tasks. Companions to hear

your struggles. Bots to remember your preferences. All

seamless. Integrated. Never sleeps. Never judges. Always

remembers and answers. Superhuman intelligence.

Transcendence of biological limits. Digital immortality.

Wait. Could technology’s endless expansion give us a new

world and cost us our soul? Seems like a good time to ask:

what are people for?

An eighth grader in our youth group said something I can’t

stop thinking about.

We were out in the parking lot. It was the fall kickoff

last month. We were in conversation about school just

starting, about friends, about stress, when she said, almost

offhandedly, “Church is the one place where I can just be

human.” I was holding a paper plate, and my slice of pizza

nearly slid off the edge.

Everywhere else—school, social media, with friends, even at

home—there is this constant, unceasing pressure to perform.

To curate. To optimize. To filter. To edit. But here? Here she

can just be. And I think she captures what we’re losing.

Space to be human.

Just this week, a colleague told me he writes emails using

ChatGPT, and here’s how it works. He drafts three bullet

points. Asks for a professional and warm tone. The AI

drafts the email. He hits send. But then he discovered just

recently that the person receiving those emails was asking

AI to summarize them in three bullet points. In other words,

we have two machines talking to each other, but there’s

nobody there.

One of my favorite theologians is David Bentley Hart. He

warns us, “The danger is not that our machines might

become more like us but that we will begin to think like them,

reduced to functions in a machine we can no longer control.”

I wonder if the extravagant promises of the digital age

sound strangely familiar to some of you. Our humanity is an

impediment that we were meant to overcome, a flaw that

we are closing in on how to correct. A hurdle that we need

only get past. If it sounds familiar, there’s a reason why.

It is the oldest story we know. It’s the serpent’s whisper in

Eden. It still echoes through our human circuitry: you will

be like God. We keep falling for it, believing freedom lies just

beyond our limits.

So here in this space, every year we do something that

makes no sense in the age of AI. We do something that does

not compute. On Ash Wednesday, I stand in this sanctuary,

and I press my thumb to perfectly good human foreheads,

smudging them with ash in the shape of a cross. Remember

that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Some years ago, I looked up to see a man I knew. Three days

earlier, we had stood together at Mary Howard’s graveside.

His wife. Fifty-six years. And when I saw him, I wanted to tell

him, in a pastoral way, with a pastoral tone, “Go home. You’ve

been through enough. You can skip it this year. You don’t

need to hear those words.”

But there he was. He was standing in line, waiting for his

turn. Then he was standing right in front of me, and I got it.

He needed those words. I pressed my thumb to his forehead.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

And his hands were trembling. And our eyes met. And tears

were streaming. And he whispered back to me, “Thanks

be to God.” For dust. For limits. For mortality. For the ache

of loss that bears witness to our humanity. Grief is the price

we pay for love, the only proof that it ever mattered at all.

Every ache, every loss, marks the depth of care we’ve given

and received. Friends, we will lose what we most love. And

that is not a design error. It is how we find the meaning we

cannot fabricate.

So, while AI promises a life without loss, without grief,

without pain, a kind of curated existence where we can

edit out the hard parts and bypass the struggle, synthetic

relationships, companions perfectly calibrated to meet all of

our needs—do you hear the whisper? You will be like God.

It’s a lie.

It may sound like transcendence, but it’s only a mirror, an

echo of what we want to hear. If you want to know how

brilliant you are, how bright you are, how good you are,

simply ask artificial intelligence, and it will be happy to tell

you. What a brilliant thought, Chris! That’s the most creative

idea I’ve ever seen. But when we settle for synthetic care, we

lose our capacity for human connection.

His whispered words told the truth. Thanks be to God for

dust, crowned with glory. And not despite our mortality. But

because of it.

What if the goal is not to escape our humanity, but to inhabit

it more fully? What if the miracle is not when we transcend

our limits, but when we discover God within them? The truth

of incarnation reverses that old lie. Not You will be like God,

but God has chosen to be like you.

In Jesus Christ, divinity does not rise above humanity;

it stoops down into the mess, to bless it and redeem it.

Yes, the sovereign God—the one who is infinite, who is

unbounded—chose limits. Got tired and hungry. Wept and

bled and died. God did not reject humanity; God embraced

it, and I’ll tell you why. Because love required it. Love

demands human presence.

And so, Jesus came. He touched lepers when fear said stay

back. He wept with mourners when efficiency said just

move on. He broke bread with betrayers when judgment

said cut them off.

And, yes, on the cross, we see what that presence cost. A

love that did not transcend suffering—a love that willingly

bore it. Embodied. Condemned. Nailed to wood. This is the

scandal of our faith that no artificial design can replicate. A

love story told in a single verse. The Word became flesh and

lived among us.

And because of this, our limits are not weakness—they are

where love becomes real.

I imagine the psalmist standing beneath a vast night sky.

He marvels: When I consider your heavens, the work of your

fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained,

what am I, what are we human beings, that you are even

mindful of our existence? That you care about us at all?

That question is the heart of worship—astonished wonder

that the God of the universe would take notice of us. And I

fear we’re trading that wonder, chasing godlike power. While

AI might promise to make you transcendent, the psalm

keeps reminding you: you are not God.

And yet. Keep reading.

You have made them a little lower than God and crowned

them with glory and honor.

In other words, the same God who spun the galaxies into

existence shaped your souls and set your limits. They are

a gift, not the problem. A crown of glory, not a mark of

shame. You are God’s child. Not a data set. Not a pattern

of preferences.

You are a mystery that no algorithm can touch. Created in

the image of the divine.

So, yes, AI can simulate connection and mimic empathy. It

can generate an arrangement of words that come together

to sound a little like compassion. Remember everything.

Respond perfectly, never grow tired of you. And you will feel

more alone than ever.

Because it cannot be in relationship. Relationship requires

two things AI will never have: a soul and a story. Without

these, there is only performance. Only metrics. Only a

mirage. Two machines talking, but there’s nobody there.

So, I ran an experiment. I used AI to help research this

sermon. And I want to tell you what I saw. Statistics on

screen time and loneliness were delivered instantly. I found

so many articles on advancements in technology that could

be summarized in seconds. For a few minutes, I confess,

I felt the rush of efficiency come over me. But something

was missing. The words were so smooth and so hollow.

The tool provided facts but couldn’t capture what it is to be

human. Here’s what it couldn’t do: it couldn’t tell me what

those gritty ashes feel like in my fingers or tell me why that

teenager’s comment stopped me in my tracks. It couldn’t

describe the awkward laugh when my friend told me about

the two machines talking. It gave me data, but we are

people of a story. And stories need witnesses.

Artificial intelligence may inform us, deliver its catalog of

facts, but it cannot form us. Can’t quite get the hang of this

human thing. It has never been bewildered by this mortal

life. Never kept vigil at 2 AM in the hospital room when

words have run out and all you can do is sit together in the

darkness. It can’t look your kid in the eye when they’re brave

enough to confess what scares them and say, “I’m here.” It

won’t leave the house to stand with neighbors when policies

threaten their dignity. It has no skin in that game. No sense

of the belovedness of another.

But the God who flung stars into being chose the

bewildering vulnerability of human flesh. Chose to be

formed by what forms us, the tender, terrible gift of

embodiment. And so must we.

So how do we resist? How do we stay human? Are you

ready? Fellowship hour.

That’s right. Stay with me. I’ve seen God there. When a

toddler weaves between legs, sticky fingers clutching a

cookie. When someone spills coffee on the carpet, and a

napkin magically appears. When those who need a place to

sit are offered one. When you stand next to a stranger, and

it is totally awkward. At first. Minutes later, you have shared

something real. A worry about your child. A memory of your

mother. A laugh you didn’t see coming. A connection made.

And you are no longer strangers.

That’s holy ground. Wherever God shows up. The neighbor

who brings a pot of soup. The bleachers where parents

share human struggles. The book club that becomes a

community. The small group that prays you through the

storm. The high schoolers planning their retreat.

Real people. Tender conversations. Bodies in rooms. Faces

you recognize. Names you forget and have to ask again and

again and again. This stumbling toward one another, each

one a glimpse of God’s glory. A reminder that God chose

presence. Chose proximity. Chose love.

Yes, the world is moving too fast for wonder. It’s hard to

stand outside and marvel at that night sky and the majesty

of God when you live in a time that sees you as a process to

optimize or data to harvest.

But you are not data. You are flesh. Made in the image of

God. So live like it.

Don’t let efficiency replace presence—because your

neighbor who lives alone is waiting for someone to knock.

Don’t let convenience replace commitment—because

young people navigating chaos need a community that

shows up for them.

Don’t let abstraction replace relationship—because love

is learned in small gestures: a smile, an open hand, a

shared cookie.

Friends, we cannot worship a God who became flesh if

we treat human beings as disposable. We cannot bear the

divine image and allow ourselves to be reduced to code.

We cannot follow Jesus and surrender our humanity.

What are people for? Not optimization, but wonder. Not

performance, but relationship. Not efficiency, but incarnation.

What are people for? The answer is love. That’s why we’re

here. It’s where we’re from. It’s what we’re for.

You are not a machine. You are not a god. Thanks be to God

for that.

Pray with me: O Lord, how majestic is your name in all the

earth. You made us dust and crowned us with glory. Help us

choose what you chose. Amen.