Sermon: Calvin/Deer Park United Church Kevin Parks, Sunday September 7, 2025 Proper 18, Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost Jeremiah 18:1-11
Sermon: Calvin/Deer Park United Church
Kevin Parks, Sunday September 7, 2025 Proper 18,
Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Please pray with me:
God, we come to your presence.
May your word be our rule,
Your spirit our teacher
And your greater glory our supreme concern.
Amen
Like our present time—like many times and places—Jeremiah lived in a politically and socially intense period of his culture’s history, and he was not shy about critiquing the people and their leaders, often finding himself in trouble with the authorities.
The first part of Jeremiah is full of lament for the disobedience of the people, that idolatry has brought ruin on the nation, and Jeremiah is complaining to God about these conditions and about the poor treatment he receives at the hands of the people he is trying to warn and redirect to the right path. Jeremiah prays and reflects on his personal suffering, he turns inward in his spiritual practice, identifying with God’s anger and sharing a grief over the disobedience of his people. For Jeremiah, being a prophet and prophesying isn’t only about formulating a convincing speech that evokes change in the hearer. Prophesy is Jeremiahs’ total life investment; it is embodied action. Jeremiah’s account is full of richly descriptive images of mimicry and symbolic actions that illustrate his resolve to be God’s mediator through his calls for repentance and renunciation of a pathway that leads the people to destruction and into a spiritual wilderness. In a sense Jeremiah is anticipating Marshall McCluhan’s idea of medium as message—the prophet is the prophesy, the model of an agent for change.
When we hear Jeremiah describe his vision of God at the potter’s wheel, we have tended to romanticize it, imagining God moulding and making us, that we are the clay in God’s hands. But, in fact it is far more complicated.
If you’ve moulded clay, you might recall that there’s something tender about the tactile immediacy of that medium’s responsiveness to your fingers, and to the cupping of your hands. The cold clay becomes warm. What was stiff and resistant becomes pliable. The clay, at first, has very little agency, it is fully under your control. Maybe, in some artistic sense you perceive a vision for what that clay might become, how you can shape its form. There’s sort of a drama and it involves some decision. Yes, we identify easily with the imprint of the maker upon the medium. But let’s not underestimate how the maker may be impacted by this exchange. As one works with a medium, new ideas spring forth about what it could be. Perhaps some agency emerges for the clay…I know as a musician, every performance is new experience, and that co-creativity changes me. I am impacted by the music.
God is impacted by us. And in Jeremiah’s performative account of the potter at the wheel, we hear how God might change God’s mind, turn away from his initial intentions for any part of creation, and start anew. The New Jewish Publication Society commentary suggests this is a sort of repentance on the part of God—a turning around.[1]
Another commentator observes that a theme throughout Jeremiah is renunciation—Jeremiah renounces idolatry, in the government, foreign and domestic policy, religion, the judiciary, business, and the military.[2] But God too is shown by Jeremiah as presenting alternatives, conditions that determine the way God acts in the future, and these alternatives open in God the possibility for change. In God’s relationship with us, we often emphasize constancy, God’s immutability and unchangeability. For many of us, this is a comfort that we hold very tightly. But, the trouble found in this reading from Jeremiah is that God is shown as having a capacity to change God’s mind. “God, who can shape a people as God wishes, wills to be affected by [the people’s behaviour] toward God. God’s responsiveness to human actions…makes human beings fully accountable for what happens to them.”[3]
School is back. It’s back for me, too. I had my first grad project class on Thursday, and guess what?...there’s an assignment due this Thursday, which involves partner work. So, I had a zoom meeting with my partner yesterday (he’s in New Glasgow, NS) to formulate our plan. There are readings and some preliminary writing to do later today, and tomorrow my partner and I will check in on our progress.
Who else in this room is back at school this week? (this is the interactive part of the sermon!!)
How’d it go?
Were there any surprises?
So, let me tell you about my surprise. In my class we talked for about 10 minutes about the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence. Now, this isn’t THE first time for this conversation, but it is the first time it has been done so thoroughly. Now, AI in higher education has been gaining a rapid profile, and I will say that I’ve used it a few times to boil down large volumes of data into something I can manage. What’s sort of beautiful (If I could use that word) is that results are produced in a matter of seconds.
Who here uses ChatGPT?
This question might get more uptake: Who here is on Facebook…or Instagram, or TikTok? (I’m not on TikTok)
Are these good and useful things? Well, yes they are. They are helpers. They create connections. They even address the scourge of loneliness.
Do they pose problems or risks? Yes, they do. There’s something unsettling about how AI can scrape up the sum of all human knowledge and decide for you what are the salient pieces of knowledge you need to live a better life. And, especially with social media, AI can figure out your preferences, your habits, your desires and curate for you an “experience” of the world that it deems matches those desires, those innermost thoughts and feelings.
It purports to understand you.
And many of us react with at least a sense of satisfaction that this intelligence, this artifice of intelligence, can know what we need before we do. Some of us even feel grateful about this.
So, in this first Grad Project class we reviewed how we will engage with Artificial Intelligence. And from the course syllabus here is our clear instruction:
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Software. You may use generative artificial intelligence tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and other AI writing or coding assistants) as aids for learning course concepts, practicing skills, or receiving feedback as you revise your original papers; you must provide citations that clearly indicate where and how you have used generative AI tools. However, these tools may NOT be used to generate or complete assignments for this course, including creating outlines of papers, writing portions of papers, or cleaning up spelling and grammar. All final submissions must represent the student’s own original work.[4]
You can probably tell by my tone and the tone of this syllabus guidance that we’re quite wary of AI. I see the power for good that it could bring to the world. And I fear the power for manipulation and destruction that—if left in the hands of nefarious actors—it could also bring into the world. Most of all, I fear for human creativity. I’ve been watching the conversations about AI aided music compositions, for instance.
Now, I want to keep an open mind, and I don’t wish to be entrapped by a sort of purity testing or unwillingness to accept new forms of creativity. But when we can no longer trust that the’ work-of-our-hands’ is truly ‘our-hands’-work’, we have crossed a barrier, and need to evaluate, to discern what that means for our future.
AI might be the single most powerful entity in our world right now. If that is not already true, it will certainly be so in the very near future.
Like God at the potter’s wheel, we have brought this thing to be. Like clay in our hands, we’ve moulded and shaped it. Initially it had no discernable agency. But that is changing. AI is becoming ever more independent, ever more capable of ‘thinking’ for itself. And we, its creator, have judgements to make. It is passed time for us to say, “this thing we made, it doesn’t satisfy us, so we’ll squish the clay back to an amorphous form and try again”.
Possibly, we—humanity—might still be able to say, “We’ve changed our mind about how we’ll allow AI to exist in relation to us, its human creators. We won’t simply let it evolve unchecked and unregulated. We won’t pretend that it is a universal good. And we will cooperate with other nations to set limits on how Artificial Intelligence is permitted to evolve.”
We might still be able to do that.
In my reading this week I came upon an opinion column in the New York Times on this topic by Thomas Friedman, titled The One Danger that Should Unite the US and China.[5] Now, in a week when China had a military parade featuring some very futuristic weaponry, attended by a coalition of leaders that would seem to form a new allyship in the shifting balance of world power (and this juxtaposed against the wild decision by executive order to rename the US ‘Department of Defense’ the ‘Department of War’) the title of this article carries rather ominous overtones. It’s a long read, and there is much that’s anxiety inducing. It’s also rational, a well-reasoned overview of the reality of Artificial Intelligence in our world, and particularly in international relations. And, at the end I was feeling some hope.
Freidman posits that “China and America don’t know it yet, but the artificial intelligence revolution is going to drive them closer together, not farther apart.” As AI becomes ever more ubiquitous, and changes “everything about everything…the need for cooperation will become ever more apparent each month.”
We aren’t talking about a slow evolution over years. The response and impact will move at a faster pace than anything we’ve experienced in the information age. Friedman believes that “the biggest geopolitical and geoeconomic question will be: Can the United States and China maintain competition on AI while collaborating on a shared level of trust that guarantees it always remains aligned with human flourishing and planetary stability?”
He goes on to say, “it would be a terrible irony if humanity finally created a tool that could help create enough abundance to end poverty everywhere, mitigate climate change and cure diseases…but could not use it on a large scale because the two AI superpowers did not trust each other enough to develop an effective system to prevent AI from being used by rogue entities for globally destabilizing activities or going roque itself.”
Ah…trust.
Friedman proposes that the focus of US and Chinese governments, along with universities, tech companies and civil society, needs to turn to training AI systems in moral reasoning, and this reasoning will need to be based upon a set of ‘universal moral and ethical principles known as ‘doxa’’. Friedman says doxa is a Greek term meant to convey “common beliefs or widely shared understandings within a community—principles like honesty, fairness, respect for human life and do unto others as you wish them to do unto you….”
Are your eyebrows rising? Doesn’t this sound like our bailiwick??
Let’s talk about ‘doxa’ a little more. It’s critical to know that the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures—the Septuagint—used doxa to translate the Hebrew word for ‘Glory’.
But what is glory?
Well generally it’s an expression of the manifestation of God’s presence. I liken it to ‘shining’, and brightness…recalling that in the account of Jesus’ birth, “the Glory of the Lord shone round about”. There’s a sense of putting forth the very best. The writer of John’s Gospel is constantly concerned about glorifying God by his writing. If we glorify a thing, we set it apart and give it very special attention.
AI needs our Doxa, our very best, our shining best selves so that it does not become the object of our glorification—that would be akin to Jeremiah’s idolatry—but so that we and our kin in the world might be glorified. More especially, that our relationships with one another in and through the glory of God revealed in Jesus and testified to by the Holy Spirit might shine forth. And AI needs the church. Where better to find disseminations of doxa? Principles like honesty, fairness, respect for human life and do unto others.
Perhaps Jeremiah is calling us into a new performance of repentance. Jeremiah has God the Potter, with the clay in his hands, changing God’s mind about his dealings with humanity. If we would only do the same for one another—change our mind about how we deal with this artifice of intelligence that we have created; change our mind about how we deal with one another.
You know, I’m a Star Trek fan. And sometimes I feel that preaching the gospel is received like the naïve utopianism that pervades that massive story. As I’ve prepared this week, I have this feeling that, in that strange way that art can imitate life and the medium can become the message, that maybe our exposure to artificial intelligence through Star Trek has been like a vapour insinuating itself in our cultural references, and has helped us prepare for a time when, for our very survival as a species, we could truly trust one another, having faith in the goodness that God has granted in and through creation.
And in this case, our turning would be away from isolationism, protectionism and empire building. Our turning would be toward preserving trust in the common humanity we hold, which we have received from the one to whom we say,
“Glory!”
[1] Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds. The Jewish Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society
Tanakh Translation. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. P. 951
[3] Craddock, Hayes, Holliday, Tucker, “Commentary on Jeremiah 18L 1-11” in Preaching through the Christian Year (1994, Trinity Press International) p. 395-396
[4] Atlantic School of Theology. GS 3000 GRADUATE PROJECT AND SEMINAR, Fall 2025 and Winter 2026. Professor: The Rev. Dr. Dave Csinos.
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/opinion/ai-us-china.html All subsequent uncited quotations appear in this article.
Comments
Post a Comment