Sermon: The Salvation of the Side Character

                I love the stories in Genesis. They’re:
campfire tales,
family lore,
the sort of stories that get:
passed down, picked up, sliced and diced and told in different ways, depending on the situation.
They are stories with:
rugged edges, dangling endings,
stories replete with repetition and swollen with word play.

                Think of it:
Adam comes from the Adamah
—Earthing from the Earth.
Out of Ish, comes Ishah
—Wo-Man out of Man.
Jacob Jabeks at the Jabok
—Jacob wrestles at Wreslin’ River.

                And so too this tale of Hagar and Ishmael—Cast out, anguished, intervention, wilderness—this cycle repeated twice…
all of it a repetition of chapter 16, where Hagar tries to escape with young Ishmael…
and all, in a curious inversion—a telling of the Exodus story
—God hears as he will hear,
God gathers and tests his people in the wilderness as Moses’ generation will as well.
First born children threatened,
slaves finding freedom
—Egyptians first, the Hebrews next in Exodus…
these stories!

                Today’s story is a sort of understory, a B-plot
—instead of main characters,
we get to consider the Salvation of the Side Character.

Let us pray.

 

                The thrust of Genesis is a series of threats to the Promises God makes to Abraham:
-God promises land, he immediately leaves the land.
-God promises children, Sara is nearly married off to two different rulers,
promises are met with laughter,
getting desperate descendants are sought by other means…
Hagar and Ishmael themselves become threats to the promise
—and yet, these side characters, these folks who could be taken as plot points
—they are people!
Humans that God cares for too!
Even the Side Characters are saved!

               

                The story begins with a party celebrating that Isaac has lived through the dangers of infancy
—he’ll be Abraham’s heir, not Ishmael.

                And then we run into one of those play on words that I talked about
—Ishmael Tzacks Itzack
—he Isaacs Isaac
—he mocks him…
or abuses him…
or perhaps even “plays Isaac”
—pretends to be the chosen heir.
And this will not stand
—Sarah insists that her husband throw her step-son and his mother out…

                And this evil thing,
this thing of anguish, is done.
Abraham sees that is it evil (another word play—rah and ra’).
And God lets it happen!

                And Poor Hagar and Ishamel are kicked out
—cast off,
send to wander in the wilderness
—not but some water and bread to their name.

                A party meant to celebrate
that an infant will not be cast off
—left to die in the desert,
instead leads to the eldest
and his mother
cast out to die.

 

 

                Jealousy, cruelty, choosing not to see evil, or see the humanity in someone that you have power over.
Being abused, thrown away, angry that God doesn’t act
—some things never change.

 

                Dehydrated,
Hagar casts her kid into the bushes,
at least she won’t see this evil thing,
the mocking sight of her child’s last breath.
But like the Hebrew Slaves in Egypt
—Hagar cries out at this awful thing that can not stand,
and her weeping moves God,
the wailing of the dehydrated Ishmael is heard,
and God intervenes.
“Do not be afraid!”
Pick up the boy, see,
in the midst of the evil of the moment, see!
See there is water to drink
—this child of yours,
forced to grow up to quickly—he’ll keep growing,
just as God will make a great nation of our the main characters
—God’s love is boundless
—the Side Characters too
—you too, have a future,
you too deserve the dignity of a nation.
Mercy for all!

                Out of this desert, find drink, grow;
be formed and re-formed by the wilderness.
Be well!

 

                Desperation, turning away at the unimaginable,
an unveiling of hope, a future on the other side.
God hearing the pleadings of the desperate,
God making a way out of no way.
These too are true today
—just as much as our beloved ancient campfire stories.

 

                Have you ever felt like your life is the B plot?
That you exited stage left,
and the play is going on without you?

                Have you been the inconvenient other?
The disinherited…
have you ever felt abandoned?

                Have you ever wondered why the world looks away from some evil done,
or why some children are forced to grow up much too quickly?

 

                Hagar’s story. Ishmael’s story.
It’s your story, it’s a promise.
Mocking will be transformed into laughter.
God does see the evil and abuse,
understands our anguish and pain
—and will not leave us as outcasts,
but instead hears us and rushes
and joins us and draws us to himself,
transforming the wilderness into oasis.
We too have a future,
we too, we most of all,
have a reason to hope!
Even the Side Characters are saved! Amen.

Four Lutheran Lenses to Look at an AI World

 

              A Lutheran/Augustinian definition of sin is “incurvatus in se”—to be curved in upon oneself, to be bellybutton gazers. This concept gets to the core of my worries about AI. AI is by its very nature self-referential. There is a corpus of information that the machine has been fed, and then this information is synthesized and re-synthesized; we have created AI with the sole function of re-creating information out of old information that is then fed to still more powerful AI so it can “learn.” Since I first got an inkling of how this process would work back in the late 2000s and looked into it a little more while writing Silicon Soul in 2015, there has been a little Lutheran alarm bell going off louder and louder in the back of my brain. We’re creating a thing curved in upon itself. If “original sin” in Scripture is tied to gobbling an apple, the “original sin” of AI is the snake gobbling its own tail.

              Fundamentally the 10 commandments are about idolatry. Those things we fear and are in awe of, those things we love and in which we put our trust, that aren’t God, are idols. Out of misplaced love, we will commit adultery; out of misplaced fear we will murder; out of misplaced trust, we will witness falsely against our neighbors. As John Calvin once opined, “humans are idol makers.” And it would be foolish to assume these old verities don’t apply in the age of AI. AI’s ability to mirror us and the sycophantic “personalities” with which they are programmed can be confused with loving relationships. AI’s seeming objectivity is seemingly trustworthy. The edge it promises to give us, and any corporation that adopts it completely, surely that can relieve our anxieties and our fears! If humans are made in the image of God, and AI is a remix of the image of humanity, then a simulacrum of a summation of Man will surely be the image of ambiguous awe! AI is a compelling funhouse mirror easily put on a pedestal, perhaps to be worshipped, invested with our fear, awe, love, and trust.

              One of the challenges of algorithms is that they encourage us to lie, or at least broadly believe the worst of those not within our information silos. I believe breaking the 8^th commandment will be even easier as we embrace AI technology. Self-referential machines, spitting out truths that are just probable next words and pixels harvested from the Aether of the internet, assumed to be omnipotent oracles, programmed to anticipate the answers the questioner desires, programmed to increase engagement and use—that’s a danger to truth. As we offload thinking (there is already talk of creating units of thinking, to help with billing of AI services rendered) buying an idea or line of logic, we will get further and further away from the actual struggle to discover what is true, and become alienated from thought itself. I’ve already run across the frustrating, John Henry-esque, experience of reading through documents with people who are using AI, and having AI assessments weighed more heavily than the actual words on the page and how the words have been used in the real world. At a certain point it feels like gaslighting, AI claiming there are five lights, when I can see with my fleshy human eyes that there are only four. In short, as we enter an AI future, answers and the seeking after truth may drift apart, and that’s not even getting into “Deepfakes” or anything on that end of the 8^th commandment.

              Finally, it is worth talking about vocations, that is, the web of roles, relationships, and responsibilities where we can regularly experience and practice our baptized identity. A life calling is not simply for the ordained or rostered minister, but for everyone. Our jobs and professions ought to profess something about the God in whom we put our trust; the way we care for our neighbors points to Christ who cares for us; the duties and joys we take on in community point to the joyous communion we have with God. And we’ve been told that AI will eliminate a wide array of jobs, it’ll do to lawyers, doctors, teachers, and administrators what automation did to the Union class. Additionally, the goal of AI is to create a frictionless life, ease to the point at which AI, not our human connections, will provide for our every need. This is a vocation-less life, called into the self-referential miasma of statistical prediction, instead of community. The ultimate vision of AI is the elimination of jobs and community, two areas where we get to be Christians in hard and meaningful ways. I worry ubiquitous AI will form people to ignore and lose their vocations, foisting upon folks a scriptless, lonely, and irresponsible life.

              So, those are particularly Lutheran concepts that I think rub up against AI in some interesting ways. Here is another Lutheran Perspective on AI, or at least reading of the Pope’s Encyclical. “why does the human person seek out the machine precisely where it relieves them without judging them — consoles without standing surety — and answers without ever pronouncing absolution?”

I’ll continue to poke at this subject, after all I’m the guy who wrote a resolution on AI.