Which Future?

Image credit: Kelly Latimore – La presentación de Cristo en el templo

Presentation of the Lord
2 February 2025

Malachi 3:1-4
Psalm 84 or Psalm 24:7-10
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40

Last Sunday we spoke about the noise that’s coming at us. It is noise not because the issues connected to the noise are not important but because the noise has become a background sound to our lives. And if we allowed this noise to constantly direct our attention, we would soon forget who we are as God’ children and as followers of Jesus, and we would no longer know our moral centre that helps to navigate these times. The noise is relentless from the celebrity news I see when I sign out of my e-mail, to the noise from an increasingly polarized political landscape in which noise has become a tactic to distract us from the deeper issues at play, as well as from the actual intentions of the actors.

To tune out the noise was not meant to suggest we would not pay attention, only that we would not be puppets directed by whatever comes our way, but would so rest in God that the shape of God’s Kingdom as embodied in Jesus would be the rock on which our house is built and keep us from getting swept away. A verse from 2 Timothy comes to mind. “³For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, ⁴and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. ⁵As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.” (chapter 4)
Isn’t it interesting how this is a passage we may have read many times and wondered about its relevancy, yet suddenly it seems that it was written for us today?

Last week my friend and colleague Thomas Keeley sent me a link to an episode of CBC Ideas. When I listened to the radio more than I do today, I used to think it was the best program on the CBC. That may still be true. This particular show was about AI, trans-humanism (where humans are augmented with or plugged into artificial intelligence), and long-terminism (to ensure the survival of the human species by populating the universe). The picture posted at the top of the page was that of the Stargate announcement from a coupe of weeks ago, showing the current American president and powerful men from industry and finance.
Do you remember the Wendell Berry quote from the beginning of our worship last Sunday? “What has drawn the Modern World into being is a strange, almost occult yearning for the future. The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven.” Berry has an ability to name the shifts that have taken place, as well as our dilemmas. The longing for the future has replaced the longing for heaven. We do well to acknowledge that this is also true for believers, for we too live in this culture. And our culture believes that the future offers us something salvific, usually mediated by technology.

To many of us the idea of trans-humanism may sound absurd.¹ I remember when cell phone ear pieces became ubiquitous and people walked through the grocery store talking to themselves, or so it appeared. And with that little blue light by their ear, they looked like cyborgs to me, unable to cast off the shackles put upon them, and not understanding they were shackles. Yet both trans-humanism and long-terminism really transfer a religious idea, namely that of eternal life, our future in God, into the realm of technology. And I would think that for those of us who have trust in Jesus, we do not need such crutches, for that is what they are. And that’s a kind way of saying it. In such thinking technology takes the place of religion. The problem is that technology does not know what it means to be human. It only understands machines. The Bible and religious traditions, however, do. Our sacred texts are full of what it means to be human. The book of Genesis tells us that to be human is to be made in God’s image, for companionship, to till the earth and to keep it, to be our brother’s keeper, as well as being imperfect and a sinner. In a way, everything that comes later in the Bible is already here (in the Book of Genesis). In contrast, we know that science has little margin for error and human sin is rarely factored into the development of technologies and their possible use.

There are other problems with the Stargate Project and the promotion of AI technology. As an aside: There is no such thing as AI art, for art is not created by machines but by humans, in interaction with the world and each other.
But the most obvious problem is that on a planet with finite resources, already threatened by climate change² the enourmous amount of energy required, as well as water, are not available except to the peril of many. According to the International Energy Agency, “large hyperscale data centres, which are increasingly common, have power demands of 100 MW or more, with an annual electricity consumption equivalent to the electricity demand from around 350,000 to 400,000 electric cars.”³ So loving your neighbour by stabilizing our climate is not a priority for those who pursue trans-humanism and long-terminism. And because this utopian dream has a perspective of thousands of years, a catastrophe here or a genocide there are minor events that pale before the greater goal.⁴ And so it turns out that the future may in fact not be friendly, at least not if run by billionaires.

In contrast to a technological non-human and trans-human future the infant Jesus is brought to the temple to be dedicated to the Lord. This infant is God in the flesh. A child in diapers. Brought by his poor parents who, unable to offer a lamb and a turtle dove, opt for a low-income sacrifice .⁵ This child is a Saviour who enters our suffering, not one who dismisses it for greater causes. Those who hail him are two elderly saints, the kind that may hail you in the nursing home to pray with you, the ones we may try to avoid. The infirm Jesus is hailed by to infirm elderly saints. Neither of them has reason to put their trust in strength. One because he is too small. The others because they are approaching the end of their earthly life. They are people without illusions. But they are people of hope.

Their life is marked by hope in the Messiah amidst their limitations. Both hope and understanding our limitations are part of what makes us human. We are not God.
Their life is marked by love. This is most obvious in Mary and Joseph who even in hardship and disappointment remain faithful to one another and whose love compels them to care for the child they did not ask to receive.
Their life is also marked by showing respect to their elders, not bypassing Anna and Simeon as too old to have anything meaningful to contribute but as those endowed with God’s wisdom.
Jesus is too small for us to lift up a deed, let alone a word, to show his humanity. But precisely in this lies his humanity, dependent as the rest of us. Later Paul will speak of Christ as the New Adam, freeing us from the sin of the first Adam, and thus freeing us to be human in the way God intended it. As St Irenaeus of Lyon wrote in the second century AD, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Jesus is that human being of which Irenaeus speaks and we who are his own are alive in him. That is the future that is friendly.

There is one more thing. Jesus, the human one, for that is one of the meanings of the title Son of Man Jesus uses to describe himself, will undergo great suffering (Luke 9:22). When here at the beginning of the story his parents bring sacrifice at the temple, then this is sign of his sacrifice that will end all sacrifice, and yet is a way of life into which he calls his friends. Being human includes suffering, not for the purpose of suffering, not because suffering were good, but because it is part of what it means to be human. Walter Benjamin wrote about pain that pain is a navigable river that never dries up and which leads man down to the sea, while pleasure turns out to be a dead end.⁶ Pain is also an opportunity for us to love each other with the love of God.

All this is to remind us to be watchful, to remember that we are God’s children and followers of Jesus, that we are human, and that our hope is in the human one, the One who made heaven and earth.

Amen.