by CCW | 1 February 2026 10:00
I don’t know which I find more disconcerting, the question “Can AI help us find God?” or the observation that occasioned the question, namely, a study claiming that “a majority of sermons in Christian churches are likely co-written with AI” (The Free Press, Jan. 28, 2026). Not mine. The idea that “AI knows more about the Bible than most human specialists” is philosophically mistaken; at best, AI is a tool for information gathering and one which is entirely dependent on what is digitally available, but information or data is not knowledge. AI knows nothing. There is no knower, thus to outsource one’s own thinking in having AI write a homily, is to my mind, sad, unethical, and undermines one’s own humanity.
Knowledge should be shared, to be sure, but in a transparent and open fashion. Sermons are about our engagement together with the Scriptures, wrestling with the understanding of heart and mind about spiritual matters which cannot be reduced to a technique or technological device. The question “Can AI help us find God?” reveals a profound spiritual problem emphasized over and over again in the Scriptures. It is simply a form of idolatry against which there is no end of denunciations in the various books of the Scriptures and with great clarity and even humour.
“Shall the ax vaunt itself over him who hews with it, or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it? As if a rod should wield him who lifts it, or as if a staff should lift him who is not wood!” This is but one example from Isaiah (Is. 10. 15) who is fully aware of the problem of confusing the Creator and the created and by extension the tool and the maker of the tool. It is wisdom to realize the age-old problem. We are the makers of the tools or technology which unmake us. It is really about us, about ourselves as knowers negating the very thing that makes us human as spiritual beings who know and love. We are made in the image of God. There is a kind of ontological line that cannot be erased between the Creator and creation, between the maker and the thing made, which all of our technological exuberance overlooks and in folly denies.
There is a wonderful story about the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse who spent some of his summers in Europe and occasionally went to Anglican Churches in Europe; this was after the internet but before AI. Once he was at a service where he heard a sermon of his own, though unacknowledged by the preacher! At the end of the service, he simply said to the preacher four devastating words: “I am Robert Crouse.” Preachers draw upon other preachers, to be sure, but there is the principle of honouring your sources. And to be sure, in our classical Anglican heritage, there are The Books of Homilies which were required to be read or preached by those who were not licensed to preach themselves. But they weren’t pretending that it was their own work.
The real form of preaching, as Richard Hooker noted, is the proclamation of the Scriptures as the Word of God. All our sermons are but our little efforts to enter into the meaning of the text. What is presented is never fully definitive nor can it be. The intent is to promote and assist the understanding of the mystery of God revealed in the witness of the Scripture; in short, to live in the Word. “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?” Jesus famously asks a cynical lawyer. AI and other forms of plagiarism are a denial of ourselves as readers who in reading and thinking upon what is read and heard become one with what we read. Augustine’s great image about reading and readers is about how we become walking books, an idea which Ray Bradbury took up in his classic Fahrenheit 451, a novel which anticipates many of our contemporary confusions, certainties and uncertainties about technology, books and reading, and about our humanity. The question about AI helping us to find God merely replays the story of the Tower of Babel: as if we on our own power and technical prowess can reach the heavens and find God. As if the tool is our master. A fundamental category error.
All this is but a prelude to today’s service on what is actually Septuagesima Sunday, the beginning of the three Pre-Lenten Sundays that contribute to the pilgrimage of Lent. Yet it is also the Eve of Candlemas, a major feast, the double-barrelled celebration of Jesus and Mary, known as The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin. The significance of this feast cannot be overstated. The rubrics in the Prayer Book make it clear that if Candlemas falls on one of the Epiphany or Gesima Sundays, it takes precedence over them. Near as I can figure that means that at least twice in a century or so, Candlemas falls on Septuagesima, Sexagesima Sunday, or Epiphany IV.
Candlemas is the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, astronomically speaking. Already you have noticed, perhaps, certain quantum leaps of light over the past few weeks. The days are a little longer and the nights a wee bit shorter. The ancient observations about the patterns of nature miraculously remain with us. Candlemas marks one of the four ‘cross-quarter days’ of nature’s year.
Candlemas is an important turning point in the transition from the Christmas cycle to Easter, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. It commemorates the first journey of Jesus to Jerusalem on the 40th day after his Nativity and connects the theme of light with life, of darkness and death being overcome by the one who is light and life. The custom of blessing candles on this day calls attention to the radical meaning of Christ as the Light and Life of the world for us, for who we are in Christ. The ritual remembrance of Simeon’s words about Christ as “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel” echoes the “light above the brightness of the sun” which blinded Saul into sight, the break-through moment of his conversion in becoming Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. That epiphany theme of epiphany as conversion complements the task to live that light in our lives as the ‘gesima’ sundays make clear in terms of grace reworking or transforming the virtues of temperance and justice, prudence and courage into forms of love or charity. It is at once ethical and doctrinal.
“How far that little candle throws his beams, so shines a good deed in a naughty world”, a wicked world, Portia says in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. She is, it might be said, a secular form of The Female Glory, a 17th century work by Anthony Stafford which shows how Mary is the epitome of our humanity for both male and female in relation to Christ. She is the Mother of God, not because she is the source of Christ’s divinity, which as creature she cannot be, but because she is the chosen vessel, pure and prepared by the grace of God, by which Christ becomes man without ceasing to be God. Christ is born “for our salvation of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to his manhood,“ as he puts it, illustrating the form of Anglican Marian devotion that is measured and governed by the Chalcedonian doctrine about the distinction of natures, human and divine, united in the person of Christ.
The feasts of Christ and the festivals of Mary are like a fugue, each moving in counterpoint one to each other. They meet together in this feast of meeting. Candlemas is a mass of light, more than just the light of one small candle. It is a blaze of light pointing to the light which is above every light, the metaphysical light of Christ. The light of God reveals the greater goodness of God beyond all knowing and being; light signalling goodness even in the darkness of our uncertain world. And like all light it is something shared and increases not decreases by being shared.
Candlemas, as the midpoint in the spiritual journey of our souls, marks the transition from the Christmas cycle to the cycle of Lent and Easter. It means “looking east in winter”, to use an image by Diadochus (5th c.), and the title of a wonderful book by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury (2021). The cross-quarter days as married to certain holy days reveal an interesting conjunction of things natural and things spiritual in the crossovers between pagan and Christian themes. Candlemas highlights the meeting of themes, a kind of coincidence of opposites. The Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy name Candlemas υπαπντη, ‘hypapante’, which means meeting. There is the meeting of old Simeon and the infant Christ, the meeting of old Anna with the child, seeing and speaking of him to others, and the meeting of Mary and Joseph with the child in the Temple at Jerusalem, marvelling at the words of Simeon about the child. In such meetings, there is the meeting of God and Man, of male and female, of young and old, more universally considered, and, by extension the meeting of cultures. The idea of meeting conveys the sense of what is learned together. Meeting together is about congregating, about coming together to teach and to learn.
‘The Meeting’ in Luke’s Gospel signals the meeting of the Old Covenant and the New, the meeting of Jew and Gentile. It is not about the triumph of one over the other but their necessary interrelation in and through which something is learned not only about God but about ourselves. At the heart of Candlemas are the words of Simeon: “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against”. This anticipates Good Friday and Easter in the death and resurrection of Christ. In that proleptic sense, Candlemas enlightens us about our hearts and souls. “We shall look on him whom they [we] have pierced”, we will hear on Good Friday just as Simeon says to Mary “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also”, indicating that the purpose of this piercing enlightenment is “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”. Candlemas is soul-piercing and heart-enlightening for us about ourselves in and through our interactions with God and with one another.
It is light and life. “A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel”
Fr. David Curry
Candlemas (transf.)/ Septuagesima
February 1st, 2026
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