My Divinity School preaching professor had a hand-out he called “The Ten Commandments of Preaching.” One of the commandments was “None of your little stories.” You can probably guess where this is going. As much as I admired my preaching professor, I’m going to tell one of my little stories.
When I was a sixth grader, a very innovative Sunday School teacher invited several of us in the class to work one-on-one with a second grader for six weeks, during the regular Sunday School hour. She was a remarkable teacher; my memory is that she gave us no instructions other than to spend the hours as we saw fit, trusting what would happen as we related with each other.
I remember the little boy I was asked to work with – I’ll call him David - very well. He was known as something of a “behavior problem” – today, we would have recognized an attention issue. So, on our first gleaming Sunday morning together, a September day quite like this one, I marched us outside for a walk around the lake in the park across the street from the church. Outside the confines of the building, walking briskly around the lake, I remember asking David where he thought Jesus was. “Here with us,” he said.
May we never make the mistake of thinking that good theology is done only by adults, let alone only by trained theologians. “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20). My young friend sensed this truth as we shared our young faith lives together. It is a core belief of the Jewish and Christian traditions: when people come together in faith, or seeking faith, God comes.
In the world that produced the New Testament, this was expressed in the Jewish text called the Mishnah. Listen to these words: “But if two sit together and the words of the Law [are spoken] between them, the Divine Presence rests between them” (from ‘Abot, in Craig A. Evans, Matthew, p. 335). You hear how very close these words are to our Gospel text. Jesus took this entirely Jewish idea and shifted it from gathering together around Torah – the words of the Law – to gathering together in his name. As the New Testament so often does, an exclusively Jewish practice – studying Torah – is replaced by a practice that can include Gentiles – gathering in the name of Jesus. Judaism is not replaced but enlarged to include the wider community. As always, the original core principle is maintained: in this case, that God comes when people relate to one another in faith.
And there is more. Another teaching of the Mishnah is that God “does not despise the prayer of the congregation“ (from Berakot 8a); that is, “the united prayer of many was much more effective than the prayer of one” (Evans, p. 335). So exactly Jesus teaches his disciples: “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven” (Matt. 18:19). So not only is God known in relationship, but prayer emerging from relationship – prayer in community - is powerful.
The point is not that God cannot be known in our private devotions, nor that our personal prayers are not heard and answered. Jesus retired regularly for private prayer and refreshment. The good news is simply this: that when we come together, as David and I discovered in our walks around the lake decades ago, God joins us and empowers our common life. We are meant to know, love, and serve God with others.
As I was preparing this sermon, I found myself reflecting on what those lakeside walks would have been like if we had both had iPhones. Would there have been room for Jesus in the space we shared? The question is a troubling one. We’ve all seen couples or families out to dinner together looking at their phones instead of relating to one another. Meta has just publicly acknowledged that their platforms have promoted addiction to social media, and that they knew it all along. We live in a world in which technology can easily compromise our ability to relate to each other in a full and authentic way. Artificial intelligence only compounds the problem, as people turn to it for all kinds of companionship, even for psychotherapy.
In his visionary book “Megatrends,” written in 1982, John Naisbitt made the distinction between “high tech” and “high touch,” and warned of the possibility that high touch experiences would become less and less a part of human life. Naisbitt feared that technology would become so prevalent that it would literally squeeze out real human connection. Forty-four years later, look how far along that path we have come. To counter this danger, Naisbitt emphasized strikingly the need for balance between “the material wonders of technology [and] the spiritual demands of our human nature.”
This is where we come in. Is there any place more committed to high touch than the church? Indeed, today’s Gospel tells us that human relationships form the foundation for Christian life. We live this out whenever we come together, whether we are meeting for coffee, engaged in service, studying together, praying together, playing together. And in these ways of relating, we believe that something transcendent happens: Jesus is present in our midst.
The One who became Incarnate is known to us in our own incarnate lives, here, together. It is precisely in high touch situations that this happens. So, rejoice in this. Take a walk around a lake with a friend, without your phone. Savor the experience of sharing in worship here. Show the world that real transcendence happens in the simple practice of living life together. When two or three of us gather, Jesus comes.
One more reflection on artificial intelligence. The English novelist and lay theologian Paul Kingsnorth calls it “The Machine,” borrowing from the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. Listen to this excerpt from Thomas’ poem “The Other”:
… The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.
Our singing – the songs of us incarnate ones – is a powerful antidote to The Machine. So are our laughter, our tears, our touching. We in the Church are called to push back against The Machine with all our might. Our faith is in a God who took human form. Our faith is in a God who came to save humanity. The Church has a lot of work to do theologically in response to AI. But meanwhile, let us sing of a God who loves us humans, and love one another with all our might knowing that Jesus is present when we do.