Preaching in the age of AI

A friend of mine shared with me a CNN about how AI (ChatGPT) can write a sermon.  My initial comment was "my job is safe!"  But I decided to see for myself what it could do.  I asked it to develop a sermon about the Prodigal Son.  I confess, I was rather impressed.  The more I explored the capacity of the ChatGPT "playground", the more I did breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that my job was safe.  That said, I did walk away from my experiment inspired, reminded of what good preaching is all about and why I love and am constantly humbled by this craft!

AI can "copy" but not "steal"; but that is still useful.

Pablo Picasso once said that good artists copy, but great artists steal.  In essence, ChatGPT is not a good thief, it is a master copier.  It takes words and sentences from the internet about a given topic and figures out how to coherently put them together in sentences and paragraphs.  It is not seeking to be original in its synthesis per se; it weighs the effectiveness of content by frequency of usage in the existing corpus of material, in this case internet sermons, devotions, commentaries and likely lyrics to Christian songs.  It is sifting through words with neither a creative nor theological lens; it simply wants the highest probable coherent word.

ChapGPT is good at this!  In the short sermon on the Prodigal Son I asked it to produce, it gave some historical context, reviewed the salient features of the story and then moved to a rather gracious conclusion:

"This is the message of the prodigal son. No matter how far we have strayed, God is always ready to forgive us and welcome us back into His loving embrace. We should never fear to approach God, because He is always ready to forgive us and welcome us back.

My brothers and sisters, let us never forget the lesson of the prodigal son. No matter what we have done, God is always ready to forgive us and welcome us back into His loving embrace."

I can imagine a human saying and even a pastor preaching something like this.  In fact, I would guess the outline of the content it produces could work as a good skeleton for many sermons.  I have a hunch that some pastors will utilize ChatGPT as an effective tool for understanding the broad "hive" mind of the internet.

I even asked it to write a sermon on the very challenging words of Jesus: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”  I don't think I could have used that sermon it produced; but it certainly wrote something that one could use as a starting point for reflection.

So should I just use ChapGPT for a rough draft of my sermon?  There are likely worse places to start, but we should be well aware of its limitations.

ChatGPT lacks fire

In the CNN article, a (Lutheran) professor Ken Jones offered that the ChatGPT would unlikely be able to offer the "For you", necessary for good preaching.  I agree with him, but let me unpack this.  To apply ancient Scripture to our lives, the preacher necessarily must make things abstract.  The prodigal son story cannot simply be about that one particular son getting is inheritance prematurely, but must be about all of us who have turned away from God to seek our own pleasure and glory.  However, if you make the meaning too abstract, the message becomes platitudes rather than proclamation.  Those listening to (or reading) a sermon must be able to hear the Word of God for them, individually and collectively, not as abstractions about life as a whole but as a Word of guidance and grace for their lives.  

Concretely, this means that ChatGPT will lack fire when preaching about moral conduct.  Here are words from a sermon it wrote about "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a stream."  (These words were spoken by a fire-brand prophet of ancient Israel against religious hypocrisy and aristocracy nearly three millennia ago).

These powerful words from the prophet Amos remind us of the importance of justice and righteousness in our lives. We live in a world where injustice and unrighteousness are rampant. We see it in the streets, in the news, and even in our own lives. It is often difficult to stand up against these oppressions, but it is something we must strive for.

Of course, who isn't against injustice?  But if one doesn't have to name the injustice, one doesn't have to do anything about it.  Good preaching ought to have some bite, some fire that challenges us, ideally stirring us to action.  Bereft of specifics, ChatGPT more or less repeatedly various wordings of the same paragraph over and over, which less impact each time.  In fact, if we pushed the argument in a Lutheran direction, the preaching ought to have enough fire that it kills the old sinner in us, forcing us to cry out "Lord have mercy."

Where AI really struggles with Sermons

Just as law that ChatGPT is offering becomes an abstraction stripped of its ability to convict us, the grace it offers also becomes an abstraction unable to heal. Here is the best of what ChatGPT offered about the words "that even the dogs have scraps." (From Matthew's Gospel, a brutally uncomfortable interaction between Jesus and a foreign woman).

Let us remember that no one is excluded from God’s grace and mercy. Let us come to him and accept his love and grace.

While certainly fine and dandy, the story's raw interaction between the woman and Jesus might make one question Jesus' commitment to inclusion. When confronted with the raw data of life (in the Bible and in our everyday), in which people often treat each other without much grace and mercy, in which exclusion is the norm, we need more than words about a gracious God. We need to have our eyes opened to the action of God's grace in the Bible and in our lives. This is done in three ways by preachers, all three of which will be impossible for AI.

Proclamation of the cross and empty tomb

Preachers move beyond talking about grace to explaining what God has done, out of grace, for you, particularly in the story of Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the grave. As I continue to play around with ChatGPT, I observe the underlying word pool that it draws from is American pop Christianity. This is really a cesspool of "TMD" - therapeutic, moralistic, deism. In this understanding of God, which surveys continue to show is what most Americans actually believe, God created the world, provided laws and numbs our pain. While all true, it is only a half truth. This is the God that loves, cares and guides, of course, but this is the God that never demands all; it also the God that never gave all on the cross. As long as AI draws theological inspiration from the general pool of English speaking Christianity, it will struggle again and again to free itself from an understanding of God shaped by TMD. The age of AI, whether Social Media algorithms or ChatGPT, will amplify messages that function like sugar. Sweet at first, perhaps toxic after a while; definitely not up-building. Preaching must strive to present God as something beyond the thin claims of TMD; presenting a Jesus who actually calls a person to lose their life and who then proceeds, before we were ready, to lose his life for us.

Good story telling

Good preachers can make the Bible stories sing and resonate in our souls. However, a good preacher also shares stories from real life that show God's grace, poured out on the cross, interrupting our lives. The more these stories amplify the biblical story and point toward the hidden and mysterious power of forgiveness and resurrection, the more powerful the preaching. The more these stories reflect the actual experience of the congregation and their context, the more resonate they become. An AI that gathers enough data to speak the language will not gather the data from one's particular community. A good preacher, especially in the age of AI, must spend less time listening to the hive mind and more time listening to actually stories of the individuals in one's community. How might the ancient stories be playing themselves out in the lives of our people? This is a question AI seems ill-equipped to answer.

Consolation of the Brethren

I put this is really old school language, but Martin Luther argued that the community of fellow believers serves as a means of grace, as we listen and proclaim good news to each other. In a world drowning in content, people are less and less hungry for sermons of historical information. I offer that they are deeply desiring a holy space and time, and moreover, an authentic community in which they can share the junk of their lives and try to make sense of it in light of a living God. As much as I love church, I wonder if the real spiritual lifting in people's lives likely happens in car rides to basketball practice, at the kitchen table, over tears before bedtime or on a barstool. Nobody wants friends that preach to them; but all of us hunger for a friend who can deliver the honest truth about our mistakes and about God's redeeming love. The AI world challenges us to equip our people to be such bearers of the word for each other. The age of AI means we can let go of proving our expertise on the Bible and embrace the role of one who fosters a community grounded in the word.

Stealing is the fun part!

There is so much I didn't cover that this brief experiment has brought to mind. So before I tempted to say much more, a toast to stealing.

When I first got out of seminary, I had a couple of packaged sermons ready to go.  Certain insights of my professors needed to be shared with the world!  While I enjoyed preaching those "pre-packaged" sermons, I believe my second and third time around on preaching those biblical stories produced much better sermons.  This was not because I had disregarded  the original insight, but because I had finally let go of it just enough to apply it to the particular context in which I served.  It was no longer copied, but stolen, that is, made anew based on the lives and stories in my community.   

For me, "stealing" is the fun in preaching.  Hearing a good idea or "take" somewhere and then playing with it and molding it to the context in which I preach.  In a world swimming with words and content, grounding the Word of God with in a particular context and the stories of a community will still be a "value add" for people.  This ultimately, I maintain, is the challenge and joy of preaching: Not figuring out the absolute singular truth about a passage or a word but prayerfully discerning what message from this ancient passage God is calling me to bring to a particular group of people.  Maybe one day the Lord will outsource this to AI, but I really don't see that happening any time soon!