Sermon for Septuagesima
“Why stand ye here all the day idle?”
The answer is clear and prescient: “because no man hath hired us.” Welcome to the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Welcome to the “brave new world” of digital exuberance. There will be fewer and fewer jobs. There will be more and more of the idle and the unemployed. Welcome to the world of automation only just beginning to ramp up. No work and all play? Think again.
Alarmist? Reactionary? Maybe. But when Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk concur that the greatest danger facing our humanity is AI – artificial intelligence – then, perhaps, even the most confirmed digital cheerleader might, just might, pause for a moment and reflect. Even, perhaps, Yuval Noah Harari, the latest super-exuberant cheerleader for a brave new world of a digitally enhanced humanity. “Now we see through a glass,” digitally, some may think, but make no mistake it will still be “through a glass darkly”. Quite apart from the myopia! There is nothing else to see, after all, if it isn’t on your screen. What can’t be seen on your screen doesn’t exist. “O brave, new world”, indeed.
Okay. A bit of rhetorical excess on my part, I admit. The rant’s over. The readings for Septuagesima Sunday speak rather profoundly to an important aspect of our contemporary dystopia. On the one hand, we are easily seduced by the obvious wonders of technology, especially in medicine and in terms of communication, or so we think. We are rightly impressed with some of the progresses in medical science, to be sure, but I leave it to you to decide whether our culture is really better informed and wiser than previous ages. On the other hand, we are largely oblivious to the ethical and intellectual problems that come with all of that. They are not insurmountable, in my view, since all of these problems are our problems. This is, as you have probably guessed, the segue to the Gospel. The very point when we realise that “Houston, we [don’t] have lift off”, is the point when we realise that the deep dilemmas of the human community cannot be solved simply by us through technological ingenuity. Ancient wisdom, certainly Christian wisdom, has been largely ignored and forgotten. The problem is not with technology – that over-used, abused and largely meaningless word – the problem is with us, with our approach to one another, to nature, and, ultimately, to God.
