There’s a place on earth that my family and I love: it’s an Episcopal camp in Sonoma Country where my kids grew up playing, and where I spent much peaceful time in spiritual retreat. There’s also a rather large mosaic mural installed on a retaining wall there, that my family built and donated. It depicts a full-maned African lion at rest in a landscape rather like the retreat center itself, and—barely visible in a far corner of the mural—a tiny habited nun.
Now as far as most of the world is concerned, the mural is a depiction of Aslan, the lion in CS Lewis’ famous Chronicles of Narnia. These allegorical tales are filled with curious children and magical animals, among whom the lion is the Christ figure. Enough of the camp children have read and heard the books that they recognize him in a mural, or—if they don’t—they still enjoy a the image of giant lion tamely lying among amidst the vineyards of the Anderson Valley. Who wouldn’t? The lion is fantastical, like something CS Lewis would write. Except that it actually happened. The tiny nun in the corner was the one who saw and told about it.
Sometime in the 1940’s, a circus train happened to be passing through the farm village of Healdsburg, and their lion escaped. It did little damage and was safely recaptured, so few people knew about it until the local paper ran the story a week later. But in the meantime, a religious sister who was visiting the Franciscan brothers, who were then living at the retreat center, spotted the lion and ran to tell the men. You can probably guess what happened. They didn’t believe her.
And really, why would anyone believe something so improbable? Why are we even here this morning listening to an even more improbable story? A story of a gentle healer and teacher whose charismatic presence among the competing powers of Roman imperialism and Jewish temple authority resulted in his judicial execution. That part was probably inevitable, given the narrative arc of the Gospels. But Jesus’ rising to life again, as our Christian story tells it? Amidst weeping women and doubting disciples and attentive angels at the door to the tomb and the world’s most oddly disguised gardener? Who would believe something like that? Who would even bother to tell—and retell over two millennia—a story so unbelievable?
Here’s one thing I know; ChatGPT would not. As most of us in Silicon Valley have inevitably heard about, that’s an artificial intelligence language generating program. There’s a lot of anxiety and hand-wringing out there about how Chat GPT and related AI functions might replace human writing; maybe even human cognition altogether. But I have it on good authority—from no less than our own San Jose State Professor of Rhetoric Tom Moriarty—that ChatGPT is not really a threat to the art of writing. “It’s great for what I would think of as low-level tasks,” Tom says. “But its responses… are very formulaic and, not surprisingly, machine-like. They lack voice and personality, and they lack creativity and insight.”
That is to say, ChatGPT would not be in the business of writing the Gospel of John. Whose rich metaphors and language play on physical sight and spiritual insight—to name just a few of John’s distinctive literary flourishes—could only come from a writer deeply immersed in the historical story of Jesus, and also in the first century community’s emerging understanding of what it all meant. John’s insights and storytelling come from the mind of person who dreamed and pondered and prayed, which is something that AI cannot yet do.
There’s something else AI language generation cannot yet do, and—I suspect—will never be able to do. And that is, to radically change the story. Turn it upside down. Take all the known patterns and expectations and reverse them. Break all the rules of how good and bad people are supposed to behave, upset the gender roles, and violate even the expectations of how life and death work. That is to say, throw a displaced lion or a resurrected human in where they clearly don’t belong. Hence the natural disbelief. “Writing,” as Tom points out, “is generative and creative. Artificial intelligence is imitative and mimetic.” Which he points out in his characteristic professorial humility, is a fancy word for imitative. All of which is to say, AI storytelling is only as good as the stories it already knows.
And that’s also true for most of us. We are people who like imitation; most of our learning happens by copying what we’ve seen other people do. And we also like categories and patterns and predictability. If that were not the case, I hardly know what to do when I wake up the in morning. It’s the coffee ritual that restarts my brain, right? But here’s something else I know about we humans. We can change the way we think about things, and about each other. We can take a tired old story about power and privilege and gender and class and who is acceptable and who is not, and tell a new story about the love of God that shows no partiality.
On the advice of a friend, I spent a portion of this Holy Week reading a novel called “Thinks…” by British author David Lodge. I’d venture to say that it passes Professor Moriarty’s test for genuinely creative writing, of the kind that no AI program is going to replicate anytime soon. It’s actually a novel about artificial intelligence, albeit in the nascent era of the late 20th century. The story is about the relationship between a rather cerebral cognitive scientist and a novelist teaching writing, both at the same British university. There’s a lot of passion in the book—spoiler alert, it’s more than R-rated—and there’s also a lot of betrayal and grief. But through the drama, the novelist heroine eventually discovers what makes her storytelling truer than its machine equivalent. “Humans can weep,” she realizes, “and humans can forgive.”
Myself, I happen to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. And you are welcome to hit me up for a conversation if you want to know why. But we don’t need to actually see the empty tomb or talk to the gardener to know that death is not the final word. We don’t need the peculiar details about which disciple ran faster, or exactly where the abandoned linin wrappings were located in the empty tomb, or what kind of disguise Jesus must have been wearing to confuse Mary Magdalene. Although these are all sufficiently odd to add a certain credibility to the story. Instead, I invite you to pay attention to Mary weeping outside of the tomb, and then—apparently mere moments later—running to tell the absented male disciples that she had seen the Lord.
Yes, the same Lord Jesus who had already—while suffering on the cross—forgiven those who tortured and killed him. Humans can weep; humans can forgive. And there’s yet one more lesson about distinctively human capabilities that John’s Gospel has to offer us this Easter morning. It’s closely related to tears and forgiveness, but I think it’s worth naming on it’s own. Human beings can let go. If that were not true, then Jesus would not have instructed Mary Magdalene “do not hold on to me.” Of course she wanted to stay close to her friend, but if she had clung to him in that moment, who would have carried the good news back to the disciples? She had a job to do, and he knew she was capable of doing it. It required her to relinquish proximity to the familiar, and the patterned roles of teacher and student, male and female.
We too can let go of what we have held dear—let go of the old stories of what community and church are supposed to be like—especially when they no longer help us to live our lives and be the church we are supposed to be now. We can, with God’s help, hear a new story, and be changed by it.
These are not the kind of narratives ChatGPT would write because they don’t imitate the prevailing stories about how humans behave. They are a radical break from familiar patterns; they tell is how God’s life-giving power can transform the stories we are familiar with and used to telling. Against all artificial intelligence odds, human beings can weep and still return to rejoicing. Human beings can suffer and still forgive. Human beings can let go of the old ways of thinking and being, and live into a story of love that is stronger than death. A story in which the stone that the builders rejected can become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes: on this day the Lord has acted, and we will rejoice and be glad in it.
