Being Human Is The Point

On the resurrection, artificial intelligence, and grief.

1 Peter 2:19–25

[F]or, if anyone who suffers unjustly endures his grief out of conscientiousness toward God, it is a grace. For what renown is there if, when you sin and are thrashed, you endure it? But, if you instead endure when doing good and suffering, this is a grace before God. For to this you were called, because on your behalf the Anointed suffered also, leaving behind a model so that you should follow his steps: “Who committed no sin; neither was guile found in his mouth”, who, when reviled, did not revile in return; who, in suffering, did not issue threats; who delivered himself to him who judges justly; who himself, in his body, bore our sins upon the tree, so that, having died to sin, we might live for justice — “by whose scarring you were healed.” For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have turned back to the shepherd and overseer of your souls.
(Translation David Bentley Hart)

In the name of God the Mother, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who breathes through us all. Amen.

All right. We’re in a season where we sometimes read texts that we tend to avoid a little bit. This letter talks in the first line about suffering. And let me just begin by saying: the Bible never explains to us why we suffer. It’s an impossible question to answer. It doesn’t even try. It does give hints and clues, and sometimes intentional directions, about how to respond to our suffering.

This excerpt from the letter that we read today was written to newly converted Christians in the first century. They were living in what is now modern-day Turkey — East Asia Minor, I think, is the official term — and many of the people who were converted were living in servitude. They were enslaved. This was not unusual. Large portions of society in those days were enslaved. It was as common as — today, I don’t know — having a wage for a job. It was considered to be fundamental to the economy of the day. And as you know, there were no direct statements against slavery in the scriptures. Yet there was an inspiration from the scriptures that led to the ending of slavery.

What I want to say, though, is this: this is one of those letters that has been used in the American South before the Civil War — and probably afterwards still — to tell those who were enslaved that they had to endure and obey, because the master was naturally their master, and “the Bible says you have to suffer.” Many women have heard this message as well, particularly those at the hands of abusive husbands: you have to suffer, for Christ suffered for you. Those who were always giving that advice were typically of my gender. Surprise, surprise.

Peter, who wrote this letter, was himself persecuted by the Roman Empire and crucified. He didn’t write as a master, or as a household head. He was writing as somebody who was suffering with, and it’s a very different story when you approach somebody and say, “I know what you’re going through, because I am going through the same thing. Let me tell you what I have discovered about how to endure this situation” — particularly when there is no way out. Because we don’t like to think about that in our modern day and age: that sometimes people are in a situation of oppression where there is really no way out. How do you respond then? That is what this text is in part about.

But let me be very clear. If you really believe that the Bible ever suggests that subservience and accepting suffering at the hands of those who are over you is acceptable in and of itself — we may have to reject it. At least that portion of the Bible. We have a moral compass, given to us by the Spirit in whom we were all baptized, with which we can say: this part of the Bible is not from God, and I will not follow it, and I will not accept it. That is an option that we always have, and sometimes must have.

There is in this text a lot more going on than just that. As you heard Sue say, this was a translation by a philosopher called David Bentley Hart, who noticed something about many modern translations of the Bible: he thought they were mistaken, and that the translations were informed by the theology, rather than the theology being informed by the translation. That’s a problem.

So in the first line we read today, it says: “If anyone who suffers unjustly endures his grief out of conscientiousness towards God, it is a grace.” Most modern translations, when you pick them up, will not say “grace.” They will say something like, “it is to their credit.” There’s a huge difference between something being to your credit and participating in the economy of grace that is from God. The grace of God is always intended to express the abundance of God — God is giving us plenty more than we could ever wish for, hope for, or pray for, and definitely more than we could possibly deserve. To translate a line like this as this is to your credit suggests a one-to-one exchange between us and God: we do one good thing and God gives us a little reward. That is not the economy of exchange between us and God. That is why the translation says: it is a grace.

Halfway through this text, we read that the anointed one — Christ Jesus — “in his body bore our sins upon the tree, so that having died for sin, we might live for justice.” Most translations will not say “tree,” even though the Greek word clearly says tree. They will instead interpret the word and say “cross.” But the association that the text suggests between tree and cross is very different, because the moment you speak of the tree in the Bible, you invoke the tree of life from the very first pages of scripture — you are brought back to the life-giving God, the Garden of Eden, and the remembrance that when Jesus was resurrected, he was resurrected to bring us new life. That is the lineage. That is what the text invokes.

This new creation that Jesus brought with his resurrection is not simply something that happened once, long ago. I offer to you today — as I have before — that new creation is available to us every day, every moment of our lives, exactly because of the example that Jesus has given. As the text says, Jesus is the model we are implored to follow. And if we follow Jesus, we follow the possibilities of new life that are offered to us all the time. Resurrection is not a one-time event that happened way back when. Resurrection is something that happens day in and day out. Many people here can testify to that, because there have been things in your life that had to die so that new things could emerge. And between those two was pain and suffering. But that doesn’t need to sway us from the fact that new life was possible.

Last week we touched upon atonement theology — a very prominent way of thinking about the crucifixion and the resurrection. The basic idea is that God was angry with the world because we were behaving poorly — in fact, so poorly that the only way God could reconcile Godself with us was through a sacrifice, and that sacrifice was his own son. By this sacrifice we were reconciled. Put another way: being human is a problem for God. Being human is the problem.

That is not what I’m reading in this text. The author first of all acknowledges that we are human beings, and that as human beings we do suffer — sometimes because of our own mistakes, and often enough as a result of injustice in the world. We are called to follow the model of Jesus Christ, which means recognizing that Christ lives within us. In following this model, when we are reviled we do not revile in return, and when we suffer we do not issue threats, as the text says. We do not deliver ourselves to the powers of this world, but to the only power that matters — the power of God, the one who judges rightly.

We had forgotten this, and therefore the text calls us sheep who have gone astray, but who now — through the baptism that Peter here addresses — have turned back to the shepherd and overseer of our soul. When you put it in the context of the overseer of our soul, you can no longer hold that being human is the problem. Being human is the point. Being dehumanized is the problem. And the answer to dehumanization is always to be more fully human.

Think, for instance, of those who have led nonviolent resistance — because this is a text that inspires nonviolent resistance. It says that in resistance, even if we are powerless, we are still fully intact human beings, children of God, and we will not act in ways contrary to the will of God. Gandhi could easily have called for a violent uprising. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King could have called for a violent uprising. Many would have followed them. But neither Gandhi nor Dr. King chose that path, because to do so would have denied that all those who participate in nonviolence are indeed touched by the divine within.

To recognize that being human is the point is exactly what we need in our day and age. Our world is changing right before our eyes, and the future that lays ahead of us is one about which many people express fear — that we are going to be increasingly dehumanized. What I’m talking about now is a bit of a switch. I’m sorry. But what I’m talking about is artificial intelligence — a new frontier of technology that has the potential to profoundly undermine the world as we know it.

Technology has always had that potential. There is one piece of technology that we now take completely for granted, but which had more impact on the way we structure our lives than almost any other — and that was the automobile. It was the automobile that made us lose touch with our neighbors, our fellow travelers, and the natural environment. We lost touch with the air we breathe because everything we did was from within an artificial box on wheels. We walked from our front door to our car and off we went, forgetting all that was around us.

Bloomberg did a survey to find out what people felt about the advent of artificial intelligence. Fifty percent of the people said they were deeply concerned. Ten percent said, “I think this is going to be good.” And those fifty percent who were skeptical expressed that what they feared most was that artificial intelligence would further dehumanize us — interrupt human relations. They are afraid that the way we live and share life on this planet, the way we are connected with one another, is going to be so disrupted that we will no longer operate as full human beings.

The possibilities of artificial intelligence are so profound, and the impact on our lives so momentous, that we have to start thinking very hard about this. And I’m not just talking about superficial things — students cheating on their exams, asking AI to write their papers. The relationship with knowledge is changing before our eyes and it’s going to continue to change. But the importance of being a human being is going to increase. We will have to ask what it means, and what it will take, to remain full participants in the world — participants who mean something, who have significance, who are not simply subjected to and dehumanized by an economic system in which AI is embedded in every aspect of our lives. We need to become participants who can contribute to life in the coming world, and not just be on the chopping block of job loss.

What we are beginning to see very clearly is that artificial intelligence is asking two specific things from us — two completely human faculties that we have to hone, sharpen, and focus on. AI can produce ten websites in three minutes. It can clean up the accounting system of a large corporation in an hour instead of days and weeks. AI can write fifteen versions of a book before an editor can read the first draft. That is not the problem. But none of that is meaningful on its own. For any of it to mean anything, we have to bring two things to the table: good taste and good judgment. The people who are going to do well in the world to come will have both of those things.

This is going to require us to rethink our entire educational system. We have delegated the task of raising human beings, to a large extent, to our schools. And my deep concern is that our current educational system does too little to support the development of good taste and good judgment, because it is still stuck in a model developed in the early twentieth century.

Schools that put students in rows, expect them to perform well on standardized tests, and increasingly deploy computers to patrol and prevent cheating — these are not the institutions that are going to bring about the full expression of one’s humanity. Students who are going to do well in the world to come are those who have developed a good sense of taste and judgment.

Let us think about one of the more innovative technological figures of our lifetime. Many of us know Steve Jobs. He found his inspiration from a class he took in college — on calligraphy. Have you tried calligraphy? It’s hard. In that class, he developed a sense of taste and style, and a reverence for design and artistry that no other class had offered him. Participation in the arts, therefore, is not going to be a luxury. It is going to be an absolute necessity. For the development of taste and judgment, the arts may be infinitely more important for many students than even math and science.

One last point. There are areas of life where artificial intelligence is being deployed now, but where it can never offer what human beings can. One such area — most critically — is grief. We live in a society that has produced writings on grief — books, papers, blog posts — that are, sorry, mostly total slop. Not to put too fine a point on it.

[Laughter from congregation]

Tired comments. Efforts to push away people’s feelings with banal expressions: “You can still hope.” These expressions betray the deep unwillingness of most of our society to allow people to grieve for real, as they need to. AI is being trained on this slop, and therefore it cannot help but produce slop in return when you ask it about grief. Try it sometime.

For those who know — and for those who know, the most important thing anyone who is feeling grief can have is to be connected to somebody who knows like they know. Which means somebody has to have experience in that specific form of grief, and will have to have been accompanied in grief by another human being to such an extent that they are now able to offer that same accompaniment to others. That is an expression of deep humanity, and it is an expression afforded only to those who will invest in being human beings.

We’re in the season of Easter, where we celebrate the resurrection. I am rereading these letters on the resurrection because we need to shed new light on them — light that stands up to the demands of our day. We cannot let ourselves get trapped behind the doors of atonement theology that says we are the problem. We cannot agree to such a statement. The resurrection compels us to regard with awe the continuous regeneration of our humanity — as a resistance to everything in the world that is out there trying to dehumanize us. The regeneration of humanity that happens when grief-stricken people are supported by other grief-stricken people. That happens when, even after serious loss, new possibilities of life — momentarily inaccessible — begin to emerge as real possibilities.

AI is here, and I think it will stay. Let us therefore be prepared to deepen our sense of humanity, knowing that being human is what we are called upon to be — and what is celebrated in the resurrection. For God, being human is exactly the point.

Amen.