(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Deep Fake/Deep Love, originally shared on March 25, 2021. It was the 101st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Deep Fake technology is blurring the line
between what we see and what we believe. Today we will consider the deep love
of God that reveals All that is True.
It seems like we are in a kind of a middle
world in the life of our global pandemic. Millions of people have been
vaccinated and are practicing socially responsible behavior to lower the curve.
The curve is lowering, and we have moved from the purple tier to the red tier,
to the orange tier rapidly. But there are spikes around the country as the
result of irresponsible behavior and, to a lesser degree, variants of the
virus. Parts of Europe are going back into lockdown but here, things are
starting to open up. Cautiously. As I’ve often quoted our governor saying,
there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel. We
wonder if we are on our way out of the pandemic, or if this is just another
disappointment looming. We encourage one another by saying, “Stay positive and
test negative”, hoping for the best.
I saw a clip by a comedian being interviewed
on TV yesterday who said, “2020 was my favorite year. I mean, the government
told us that UFOs were real and it didn’t draw any interest. Aliens are real
and we said, “Oh. Do they have COVID?”
How do we get consumed by one thing and
ignore other things of importance right in front of us? I think that at least
part of the answer is that we sometimes will only pay attention to that which
immediately affects us while ignoring that which ultimately does.
You may have seen artificial intelligence
technology on the news making someone look and sound like Tom Cruise.
You may also have seen similar technology
used to animate old still pictures and make them look alive. The app uses what
it calls Deep Nostalgia technology to make faces in old photos blink, turn,
smile, twitch, look around and so on.
One of my relatives on my mother’s side of
our family has done it on a family page on Facebook for faces in very old
family photos. A moving photo somehow makes the image look more contemporary,
less like a stiff distant image and more like someone you know.
It’s fascinating to watch and creepy at the
same time. Fascinating because movement seems to give us more clues into what a
person might really have been like. And creepy because it feels a little like
animating the dead in a way that old movies are not. Movies were made to move
and are familiar artifacts from a certain era. Photos, especially very old
photos, were not.
Do you remember the newspaper in the Harry
Potter books and films, The Daily Prophet? I remember, a couple of years after
they were released, seeing a story in the news about a computer in development
that was to be very thin and on which news stories would appear. The stories
would also update and change constantly. The photos in The Daily Prophet were
animated. We could use video to accomplish the same thing, but video uses a lot
of computing power. Perhaps photo animation will be an intermediary step toward
our own Daily Prophet.
Maybe a better analogy from Harry Potter,
and a more cautionary one, would be The Mirror of Erised.
Harry
discovered a room with a full-length mirror on a stand in which a person would
see not only their reflection, but a reflection of their deepest longings. “Erised”
is “desire” spelled backwards. For Harry, that was the animated image of him
with his loving parents, whose love for him had led them to give up their lives
so that he might live.
That sacrificial love part of Harry’s
backstory, by the way, gave rise a Christian take-a-way from the series. In
fact, the inscription on Harry’s parent’s gravestone was from Paul’s first
letter to the Corinthians, the 15th chapter, starting at the 20th
verse, where Paul writes this about Jesus overcoming every enemy:
*1 Corinthians 15:20-26
The inscription on Harry’s parents’
gravestone was the verse, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
Once Harry has found the mirror, he sneaks
into the secret room as often as he can to gaze at himself flanked by the
images of his loving parents for hours at a time.
His mentor and headmaster, Albus Dumbledore,
knows this and advises Harry to stop looking at it, that the mirror can give
neither truth nor knowledge. And it cannot bring happiness. Dumbledore observes
that people have wasted away in front of it, or been driven mad, without
knowing if what they are seeing is real or possible.
Paul mentions a mirror at the end of his
chapter about self-less love, 1 Corinthians 13, starting with the 11th
verse:
This selfless, self-sacrificing love is the
love with which Christ has loved us. It is seen most clearly on the cross,
where Jesus defeated sin, death, and the power of the devil with his death. His
life wasn’t taken from him. He gave it. Jesus died for us, so that we may have
eternal life.
We live now in that in-between time. Death
has been defeated in Jesus Christ. We die with Christ in our baptisms and because
of that, we will rise to be with Christ in the last Judgement.
What we can know now is limited. We see in a
mirror dimly. Now, we see things as we are, but in the world to come, we will
see thing as they are, face-to-face.
Meanwhile, we are in that middle-world time,
in the already but not yet Kingdom of God, between the first coming of Jesus
and the second.
What is necessary for our redemption, for
our salvation, has already been accomplished and made known in Jesus Christ.
We don’t live by the things we see or by the
desires of our heart. We don’t live by the appearances of the deep fakes and
lies of the now defeated sin, death, and power of the devil, all the forces
that defy God. They are defeated in Jesus Christ.
We live by the deep love of God, the deep, selfless
love of God that models for us who we are in the power of God, the streams of
living water within us that is the Holy Spirit, the personal ongoing presence
of God for good in the world. We are wholly and reliably dependent on God.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes of
the depth of God’s ways. In the 11th chapter, starting at the 33rd verse, Paul says:
The deep, selfless, sacrificial love of God
is shown on the cross not because we are God’s children but because we were not!
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, the fifth
chapter, starting at the 6th verse, Paul writes
*Romans 5:6-8
What can we do?
Pray with thanksgiving today and open your
heart to receive the gift of faith and seek baptism or, if you have been
baptized, seek to live it. Be guided by God’s deep love alone.
Open your mind to the leading of the Holy
Spirit to engage with God in the Bible, to seek forgiveness and a clean heart,
and to see God’s presence in all things all around you.
Engage your strength as God’s strength to
endure and bear witness to God’s deep love in overcoming all things for you and
for all people, that all may be saved from the deep fakes of this world, by and
for the deep love of God.
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