Grace Cathedral

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“Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen” (Lk. 24).

You are not a machine. “This is your life. The only life you will have.”[i] What a blessing it is to see you, to be together. We are going through so much and I am grateful for this Easter Day when we can come back home to ourselves. It is hard to be a human being these days, isn’t it?[ii] So much conspires to make us less than human.

At 8:30 a.m. I tried out another version of this sermon on a focus group of about one thousand people. I talked about the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the tumultuous changes in our government over the last three months and about how many people may soon feel more connected to AI Chatbots than to real human beings:

AI has begun changing our lives. Have you wondered how 60,000 civil servants can be laid off, 1500 free-speech loving college students have had their visas revoked, thousands of government grants cancelled, billions of dollars of tariffs levied (and on islands only inhabited by penguins) mostly by a tiny team at the Department of Governmental Efficiency?[iii] Perhaps these changes have something to do with AI too.

Seven in ten teenagers (age 13-18) have used generative AI.[iv] We are on the verge of a future where young people have deeper connections to AI Chatbots than to actual human beings. In a recent New Yorker article Jaron Lanier asks, “Is it important that your lover be a biological human instead of an A.I. or a robot, or will even asking this question soon feel like an antiquated prejudice?”[v]

He goes on to write, “In the tech industry, we often speak of A.I. as if it were a person and of people as if they might become obsolete when A.I. and robots surpass them, which, we say, might occur remarkably soon.”

That’s the problem isn’t it. When we use the metaphor of human consciousness for machine computation, and speak about memory as if it were encoded in electronic circuits, it does not take that long for us to regard ourselves as a kind of machine. But there are other ways to lose our humanity.

One of my favorite intellectual developments over the last forty years has been the emerging field of Behavioral Economics. Daniel Kahneman once jokingly described himself as “the grandfather” of this field. He writes about it in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. In the 1970’s social scientists thought that people were 1. Generally rational, and that, 2. Emotions explained the way we deviate from rationality. He writes, “You believe you know what goes on in your mind, which often consists of one conscious thought leading… to another. But that is not the only way the mind works.”[vi] We have predictable unconscious biases. Our behavior can be nudged in ways that are completely beyond our awareness.

My point is that Daniel Kahneman has had a huge impact on how we understand human experience. And yet in March of last year he flew to Switzerland where he died by assisted suicide. Although he was ninety years old he was in reasonably good health, still active in research, and capable of participating in family life.

A few days before his death, interviewers, with whom he had shared his plans, asked him if these were sufficient reasons to stay alive. He responded, “I feel I’ve lived my life well but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done. I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant.”[vii] I felt so sad when I learned about Kahneman’s feelings of irrelevance and disconnection. Our philosophy can kill us.[viii]

Easter is not about a past event. It is how God meets us right now. It is about how we become human again. Today we remember the story of the first Christian sermon. A group of three women and their friends report on their strange experience at Jesus’ tomb (and are mostly not believed). I am going to talk about three important words from this ancient story and what it means to be human.

1. Perplexed. The women at the tomb are perplexed. In Greek the word is aporeo. In Greek poros means passage, aporos means impassable. It is related to our word aporia. The dictionary definition of aporia is, “an irresolvable inner contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument or theory.” It is like when someone from the island of Crete tells us that all Cretans are liars.

To be human means that we will never quite get to the bottom of things. We will never really know the interior life of the people around us. We will never understand their suffering. At the same time we were made to be in communion with the utterly free beings who we all are. And we will never quite know what we mean to others.

When I first fell in love with my wife Heidi I felt like I had always known her, that I had been waiting for her all along. The theologian Karl Barth writes about knowing another person in this way, that we exist in encounter. When we know what we love, we know who we are. He says, “I have waited for Thee. I sought Thee before Thou didst encounter me. I had Thee in view even before I knew Thee. The encounter with Thee is not, therefore, the encounter with something strange which disturbs me, but with a counterpart which I have lacked and without which I would be empty and futile.”[ix]

The writer Anne Lamott spoke about the meaning of Easter for her. She says, “When I was 38, my best friend, Pammy, died, and we went shopping two weeks before… and she was in a wig and a wheelchair. I was buying a dress for this boyfriend I was trying to impress and I bought a tighter, shorter dress than I was used to. And I said to her, “Do you think this makes my hips look big?” and she said to me so calmly, “Anne, you don’t have that kind of time.”

“And I think Easter has been about the resonance of that simple statement… you have time only to cultivate presence and authenticity and service… That’s how it has changed for me. That was the day my life changed…”[x]

2. Depths. The Easter story starts out in “the depths” of early morning. Luke uses the Greek word bathos which is related to our word bathysphere (the little submarine that goes to the bottom of the ocean). What is deep is another central part of being human. The theologian Paul Tillich writes that you will not find eternal joy merely from living at the surface of things. He says you have to listen to the voices speaking in our depth and from our depth. He says forget everything traditional that you have learned about God. The name of this depth is God. It is what the word God means. It is the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being.[xi]

C.S. Lewis said that our experiences of what he calls joy give us an insight into this depth. Joy is not the same as happiness or pleasure. It is a momentary experience and then a kind of longing for something like it which is beyond our control. I re-read his biography Surprised by Joy to prepare to speak to you about this today. It’s hard to talk about these experiences but when we do we find that many people have had what you might call this experience of transcendence. For homework this week ask someone about this… In Lewis’ case during childhood, he felt moved by the smell of the flowering current bush in the garden, by the way autumn was depicted in a book by Beatrix Potter and a section of a Longfellow poem about a realm beyond experience.[xii]

In her book A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard writes about how horrifying nature can be with its teeming swarms of parasites that consume other creatures. But then she describes her own fleeting experience of depth. “When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.”

“It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame…. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.”

“… Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision mostly comes and goes… but I live for it.”[xiii]

3. Living. The angel at the tomb says, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” The word is zao and means to live. Our former dean Alan Jones used to ask, “What truth do you want to become by the end of your life? He said that as a child his daughter used to ask him if it would be alright. He didn’t know what “it” was and wondered if he was lying when he said that it would be okay. Later he realized that things will turn out right when we realize that life is a gift from God.[xiv]

During the pandemic, while sheltering in place, Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote about how when famous people (like Daniel Kahneman) are interviewed they are asked how they would like to be remembered, “invited to think of the achievements they would like to have piled up at the end of their lives.”

“What if the point of all we achieve, all we succeed in, is to teach us to receive more deeply and peacefully? As if what we need to produce by the time of our death is just – child-like simplicity? Being able at last just to be welcomed, to be embraced by the Real that we’ve so long neglected and even run away from? Whatever life is like on the far side of death, it’s a reasonable guess that it is not like anything we could have imagined. It could not be another episode in the great drama of Myself, my busy, worried, ambitious, talkative, fearful self.”[xv]

Today I talked about how we are humanized through the mystery of encountering another person, by the experience of depth called joy, and the realization that living is learning to receive God’s grace.

Last week Anna Lapwood played a sold out organ concert here at the Cathedral. 8.4 million people viewed her Instagram post about it. On the way home after the concert two concert-goers were having an animated talk together. The man almost missed his stop. It seemed as if he had lost her forever. The next day Anna received a letter from him asking her to contact her social media followers so that he could find the woman he lost. She did and the two were reunited. Sometimes I imagine God seeking us in this way.

When we look at the world we see so much viciousness and cruelty around us, so many ways that people are being treated as less than human. We are even unkind to ourselves. But life is too short for this. We are so much more than our accomplishments or other people’s opinions of us.

We are like bells waiting to be rung by the one who seeks us, by the depth which is God. You are not a machine. This is your life. The only life you will have.

_____________

Production:

Daniel Kahneman

Heidi Ho

Karl Barth

Anne Lamott Annie Dill

[i] Anne Tyler’s character Reverend Emmett in Saint Maybe (1991).

[ii] When I last saw many of you, at Christmas, I spoke about the accelerating adoption of large language models which we often refer to as “AI.” Looking back I was so naïve as I shared my discovery that AI sermons seem flat and robotic, but that sometimes it’s jokes are kind of funny in a not-funny joke kind of way. Uncanny, unsettling juxtapositions of the Easter Bunny, the crucifixion, software glitches, error messages, jargon and the empty tomb.

ChatGPT “Easter AI Jokes, ”Wednesday 16 April 2025.  What happened when AI tried to understand the empty tomb?It kept returning a 404: Body not found.

Can AI experience Easter joy?
Only if someone installs a “Hallelujah” plugin!

It also told me that it could help write a sermon on “Artificial Intelligence vs. Divine Wisdom.”

[iii]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mass_layoffs#:~:text=As%20of%20April%201%2C%202025,reductions%20in%20force%20(RIF). See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_government_grant_pause

[iv] Jessica Grose, “Say Goodbye to Your Kid’s Imaginary Friend,” The New York Times, 16 April 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/teens-chatbot-threat.html?searchResultPosition=1

[v] “This uncertainty is more than a transient meme storm. If A.I. lovers are normalized a little—even if not for you personally—the way you live will be changed.

Does this notion disturb you? That’s part of the point. In the tech industry, we often speak of A.I. as if it were a person and of people as if they might become obsolete when A.I. and robots surpass them, which, we say, might occur remarkably soon. This type of thinking is sincere, and it is also lucrative. Attention is power in the internet-mediated world we techies have built. What better way to get attention than to prick the soul with an assertion that it may not exist? Many, maybe most, humans hold on to the hope that more is going on in this life than can be made scientifically apparent. A.I. rhetoric can cut at the thread of speculation that an afterlife might be possible, or that there is something beyond mechanism behind the eyes.

Until the recent rise of A.I. it was fashionable to claim that consciousness was an illusion or, perhaps, an ambient property of everything in reality—in either case, not special. Such dismissiveness has become less common (perhaps because techies still believe that tech entrepreneurs are special). Consciousness is lately treated as something precious and real, to be conquered by tech: our A.I.s and robots are to achieve consciousness….”

Jaron Lanier,“Your A.I. Lover Will Change You,” The New Yorker 22 March 2025.

[vi] “When you are asked what you are thinking about, you can normally answer. You believe you know what goes on in your mind, which often consists of one conscious thought leading in an orderly way to another. But that is not the only way the mind works, nor indeed is that the typical way. Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there. You cannot trace how you came to the belief that there is a lamp on the desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation in your spouse’s voice on the telephone, or how you managed to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.”

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) 4.

[vii] Katarzyna de Lazari-Radex and Peter Singer, “There’s a Lesson to Learn from Daniel Kahneman’s Death,” The New York Times, 14 April 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/daniel-kahneman-death-suicide.html?searchResultPosition=1

[viii] The researcher Lisa Miller has been on our Grace Cathedral Forum. She studies how spirituality positively affects our health and protects us from addiction and despair. She writes that affluent youth have a much lower rate of spirituality than other demographic groups, that only 15% of them report having a spiritual identity or practice. She says that this comes from being socialized in a culture that equates their worth with their appearance or success in school.

“Suniya was in the midst of a longitudinal study, tracking kids from adolescence to adulthood, from age twelve to twenty-four, and asked if I’d work with her and add some spirituality measures to the study.

A few years later, she and our grad student Sam Barkin came to my office at Columbia to share some initial findings. They found that among the affluent youth, the rate of spirituality was significantly lower than in the population at large. Only 15 percent of the kids from highly resourced suburbs reported that they had a personal spiritual identity or practice a rate of spirituality less than one-quarter the national rate published in Pew and Gallup polls. They also found that the 85 percent of the sample who were not spiritual had over tenfold the national rate of risk for sociopathy. Socialized in a culture that equated their worth with how fat or skinny they were, or whether they got an A or a B on the last exam, they had no unconditional love…”

Lisa Miller, The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life (NY: Random House, 2021) 139.

[ix] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume III: The Doctrine of Creation, Part 2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. Harold Knight et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960) 247, 269.

[x] Anne Lamott published in: https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2025/4/2/anne-lamott-on-how-easter-changed-for-me

[xi] Paul Tillich, “The Depth of Existence,” The Shaking of the Foundations (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948) 52-63.

[xii] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (NY: Harcourt Brace Johanovich, 1955) 18.

[xiii] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (NY: Harper & Row, 1974) 33-4.

[xiv] Alan Jones, Living the Truth (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Press, 2000) 12-2.

[xv] Rowan Williams, Candles in the Dark: Faith, Hope and Love in a Time of Pandemic (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2020) 71-2.