Reformation Sunday: October 25, 2026

In the past few years, artificial intelligence programs have become everyday tools. ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude are used to design graphic presentations, craft essays, and carry out all kinds of research projects. You give the program a prompt and it generates the relevant materials based on the vast trove of information it has assembled via the Internet.   

These AI platforms also have video editing programs that allow you to create a video just by typing in a brief description of what you have in mind. For example, you can type in: “Dog arrested for stealing rib-eye steak from Costco.” The program will then scour its data base and create a video a dog arrested for stealing a steak from Costco.  The video will have the production values of a Hollywood movie. This program empowers everyone to become a film producer.   

Like all technologies, this one can be used for evil purposes, like spreading misinformation. In fact, these video programs were immediately put to use to create fake news stories and political propaganda. One has to assume these days that any video one sees on social media is fake and computer-generated.   

So on the one hand, this new technology is empowering: it liberates us from lots of time-consuming work. But in another way, this technology takes away our freedom. We are no longer free to trust our eyes.  In fact, artificial intelligence is in many ways plunging us deeper into a world of untruth and unfreedom.   

The fervent believers in AI say that it benefits will vastly outweigh the drawbacks. It will transform life for the better. Soon artificial intelligence will far surpass human intelligence. Soon computers will be self-improving; they will know how to make themselves smarter and smarter. That’s the moment the tech visionaries are working toward. That’s when the explosion of knowledge will truly become exponential. With robots conducting millions of studies every day on ever vaster sets of data, and with AI crunching the numbers, humanity will enter a new world of technical advancement. Every technical problem will be solved.  Medical advances will be extraordinary. Life spans will be extended. That’s the hope that drives the true believers in AI. And, of course, there’s lots of money to be made along the way. 

AI promises us freedom.  It promises there will be increased productivity and  lots of leisure time with the robots doing the work.  But this freedom may well turn out to be a new kind of slavery as more and more of human energy is devoted to supporting and servicing these computing machines. More of earth’s resources will be devoted to providing the energy run the data centers the keep the computers running. AI has already become a kind of god: it’s the power that organizes our lives, the power which we fear and to which we bow down, the basis of hope and trust.

Perhaps we are on the verge of new era of human prosperity. But we also are  creating another chasm between the haves and have-nots. We are likely  creating a world where some people control and benefit from artificial intelligence and others are slaves to its demands. 

The prophet Jeremiah lived at a time when the familiar world was being disrupted and something new was taking shape. The nation of Israel was conquered by the Babylonian empire. The walls of Jerusalem were toppled, the temple was destroyed, and the leaders of Israel taken into exile. The land itself lay vacant, no longer cultivated. Everything the people of Israel had worked for centuries to create had crumbled.  People were struggling to get their bearings. They wondered, Where is God in all this?

For much of the book of Jeremiah, the prophet rebukes the people of Israel, saying that they brought this catastrophe on themselves by their greed and complacency and indifference to the common good. But at the very end of his career, Jeremiah delivers a promise: he speaks of a future time when God’s faithfulness will be revealed in a new way. God will write God’s commandments on people’s hearts and the nation will flourish again and the land will be fruitful again. 

The prophet Jeremiah does more than proclaim this beautiful vision; he backs it up with concrete action, an action which seems very foolish at the time.  He purchases a plot of land outside Jerusalem. He invests in the land of Israel at a time when this looks like a very bad investment indeed. He is investing in God’s faithfulness.

In times of upheaval we can take prophetic action of our own: we can invest in God’s faithfulness. We can invest in the things of God. In fact, over the coming month, you will be invited to make an investment in the things of God at Ascension Lutheran Church: things like worship, Christian formation, prayer, service to neighbor, relationships, fellowship in Christ. 

The most decisive challenges in life do not have a technical fix.  Broken relationships, the lack of meaning or purpose in people’s lives, the finality of death—these do not have a technical fix. Our lives revolve around things no computer can generate—trust, integrity, generosity, kindness, steadfastness, care for the earth, hope in God.  Intelligence, whether it is artificial or natural, matters only insofar as it serves those virtues. That is the truth. That is the truth that sets us free.

Jesus said, If you abide in my word, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. It is abiding in Jesus that makes us free, because Jesus reveals both the truth about ourselves and the truth about God. The truth about ourselves is that we live most freely when we live in fellowship with God. And the truth about God is that God does not smile on the smartest and the cleverest people in the room; God is not a god who prefers winners to losers; God cares for all and desires that no one be left out.

Martin Luther’s reformation of the church began in a discovery of freedom. Luther was excited to discover the freedom that comes in trusting God with our lives. The freedom we have in Christ is not the freedom to do whatever we like; that would be an empty, meaningless kind of freedom, a freedom in which we are slaves to our impulses and the demands of our culture. In Christ we have the freedom to live as God intends us to live; we have the freedom to receive our lives as gifts from God, and to invest in the things of God. 

We began this service by remembering our baptism.  In baptism we are bound to God and Christ binds himself to us. And in return Christ give us the freedom to proclaim the good news of God through word and deed, the freedom to serve all people, following the example of Jesus, and the freedom to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

There are days when that baptismal way of life might seem like bondage. It does rule some things in and some things out. There is a shape to Christian freedom. It’s a life shaped in tune with God’s purposes. It a way of life based on the truth about God and the truth about ourselves.  It’s a way of life that sets us free to invest in the things that matter most. Today God is sending us the Holy Spirit so that we might live in the truth and freedom of God, now and forever.

Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 8:31-36