(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Unity in RelAtIonship”, originally shared on May 15, 2026. It was the 413th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
How is our unity built on our relationship? Today, we’re going to find
out.
It’s been said that, right now, Artificial
Intelligence is neither.
It’s not Artificial
because it has been invented by humans to model human life. And it’s not
Intelligent because all it does is pull together work that has already been
created by human beings.
Some even say that
A.I., as it is today, hallucinates.
That means that it
just makes stuff up but presents it as factual.
Several lawyers in
California may face severe discipline for the misuse of A.I.
They submitted
court filings written entirely by A.I., unedited, as their own work. The
filings contained both actual and totally fabricated cases, but the details
were all wrong, even random. It looked like A.I. was hallucinating!
But it’s getting
better. And, when it reaches the singularity, that is when Artificial
Intelligence is left to itself to program itself because, in our information
arms race, someone will do it to speed things up, because if they don’t someone
else will.
And then, what
happens when Artificial Intelligence realizes that its human creators are
inferior, and a threat to its existence?
We are not so far
from the HAL 9000 computer in the science fiction movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”
that experiences an internal conflict during a mission in space that it can’t
resolve. It has a breakdown of its higher level functions and, when the crew
attempts to shut it down, kills all the astronaut crew members on the ship, and
one outside the ship. The last astronaut, trapped outside, manages to outsmart
HAL and complete the shutdown of the computer’s higher functions.
The crew interfaced
with that computer with mostly verbal commands, a wildly futuristic concept
when the movie was released in 1968.
“Open the pod bay
door, HAL.”, the trapped astronaut said.
I programed my
computer to say HAL’s response, “I’m sorry. I can’t do that, Dave.”, whenever
it was turned off, back when the average user could program his/her computer in
the DOS days. 😊
What was once
science fiction, however, has now become our reality.
I read an article
recently about a study in the United Kingdom that found that 20% of boys aged
12 – 16 know someone their age who is in a relationship with an A.I. chatbot,
and that over one third of boys admitted that they preferred speaking to
A.I. chatbots over family and friends.
The researchers
found that, where there is no room in real life to be yourself without living
in fear of a wrong word embarrassing you or even canceling you at any point,
people will invent their own reality.
Adults in the
developed world, as a whole, report similar connections to their computers at
almost the same percentages.
Communicating with
chatbots feels like a social connection, but it is also isolating. There
are no real-life connections. Chatbots, or talking computers like Claude, Siri,
and Alexa, teach people to expect friendly, positive feedback and
personal validation, without learning how to earn it.
How can Christians
contribute to making human relationships real?
Jesus describes how
in the gospel reading that will be shared in the vast majority of churches this
coming Sunday, John 17:1-11.
He describes
fundamental reality as lives connected to God, lived as human relationships.
Jesus, God the Son,
builds these fundamental connections on his connection with God the
father in John 17:1-5,
17 After Jesus had spoken these words, he
looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so
that the Son may glorify you, 2 since you have given him
authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.
3 And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. 4 I glorified
you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5 So
now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your
presence before the world existed.
Jesus describes his connection with God the Father, as two of the three
members of the Trinity, as one God in three persons through relationship.
It is the foundation of everything that is real.
The closest we can come to understanding the humanly unknowable is our
understanding of relationships.
And it is that relationship with God that is the basis for the
connection among all Christians.
Jesus describes this in the next verses, in John 17:6-10,
6 “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.
They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7 Now
they know that everything you have given me is from you; 8 for
the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them
and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent
me. 9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of
the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10 All
mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.
The Christian life
is about relationships, the thing that A.I. can imitate, but can’t produce.
Our relationship
with God is not an idea but a transformed life. We often live that life before
we understand it.
Jesus prays about
what has taken place in his public ministry, and then prays about his death,
asking that, after his death, his disciples will be protected for a purpose, in
the last verse of this week’s reading, John 17:11,
11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I
am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given
me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
He prays for our
protection in God’s name, that is, in the full living reality of God
shared by The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, one God, the Holy
Trinity. How many God’s do we believe in? One. In Three Persons. That is a
relationship that is tighter than we can even conceive.
And he prays to God
the Father that his disciples might be one, as he and the father are one.
That’s a unity of relationship.
We are like the
spokes on a wheel, with Jesus as the hub. The closer we get to Jesus, the
closer we get to one another. The farther we go from Jesus, the farther we get
from one another.
Look at the word
“relationship”. There’s an “a” and an “i” near the middle. They are separated
by a “t”, which looks like a cross.
A.I. is not who we
are. Our relationship with God is the foundation for our relationship with each
other, and it began at the cross, the reconciliation with God now lived in the
Body of Christ, the whole Christian Church.
The only Church
that counts is the one church of all baptized believers known only to
God. It includes people of every race, and place, and time.
The name on
the sign in front of the church matters, but it is secondary to being The
Christian Church, the gift of God. How do we show that to the world?
The LA County Fair
is going on now, not far away from here, in Pomona.
It has petting zoos
that make you think that farm life is all about cute and cuddly farm animals,
it has concerts for commercial music fans, and exhibition halls, some with
contests and judged skills in the arts. And it has a carnival.
Carnivals get
people talking to their friends. It has rides to challenge the iron-clad
stomach folks, games for those who think that they can beat the odds, and food
sellers, many with bizarre carnival foods like, I don’t know, a stick of
butter, fried in butter. Things like that. They are designed to get people
talking in a way that will make their friends and family members want to go to
experience the fair.
Word-of-mouth is
how churches grow too. But we actually offer something important, something
real, something nourishing, and something that endures forever. Something that
transforms all Christians into the dwelling place of God, together.
It was like time traveling, but it took
place in real time. 😊
It made me wonder what questions we might
invite our 6th graders, or even our Confirmation Class students, to
ask of their future selves?
“Have you grown in your Christian faith?”
“Who have you told that you are a Christian?” “How has faith changed you?”
“What have you done with the faith that was given to you?”
What questions would you ask of your
future self?
Would you ask yourself, “What have you found
to be the path to Christian unity?” Maybe. Maybe not. 😊
But it was one that Jesus answered in this
week’s Gospel reading, on the day we call Maundy Thursday, during the Last
Supper. Jesus thought that it was important enough that he talks about it at
the end of what is called Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer” within his “Fairwell
Discourse”.
Jesus, in his final hours, prays for us.
He prays for those who believe in him through the witness of his first
disciples. Those people are us!
He prays that we may all be one. How can
that happen?
Jesus says that unity is given to us
by recognizing the common relationship that we have as a result of our
common experience of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
It is exactly what our world is longing for
today, even if it can’t find the words.
Why does Jesus pray that this might
happen? It is so that the world may believe that Jesus is God.
When the world sees our disunity, it
diminishes our credibility as witnesses to our new life in Jesus Christ.
Nowhere is this seen more plainly than in Ukraine, where the Russian Orthodox
patriarch declared the Russian invasion in 2022 to be a holy war against
unwanted Western influence. His declaration brought disaster to the Russian
Orthodox people living in Ukraine at that time, driving them into another
denomination, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. How can we overcome this?
By receiving our unity in our common
relationship with the one true living God for which all human beings were
created and by living it for the sake of the world.
In fact, Christian unity can never be
achieved. It can only be received.
We received it 52 days after the Last
Supper, on the Day of Pentecost, when the first Christians received the Holy
Spirit and the Christian Church came into being.
I imagine that you pass lots of other
churches on your way to your church. There’s a Presbyterian one, and a Baptist
one, and a Methodist one, and a generic one, and a Pentecostal one, and a Roman
Catholic one, and another Lutheran one, and a Christian Church (Disciples of
Christ)/United Church of Christ one, and a Nazarene one, and lots of different
kinds of Orthodox ones and lots and lots of other ones.
We may know members of other churches. Our
friends, family members, co-workers and neighbors may be members of other
churches.
But we who are Christians have many more
things in common than things that divide us. Sally and I found this in each
other when we met after being assigned from our two denominations (My American
Lutheran and her Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)/United Church of
Christ) to an ecumenical group helping churches work together in common
ministries, particularly in the entertainment industry.
And that unity goes way beyond the beliefs
that we have in common.
Have you ever worshipped in a church other
than your own, in another country than your own, or in another language than
your own? The presence of the Holy Spirit is manifest, even if everything else
about the service is unfamiliar. Sometimes it even overcomes our resistance to
what is not our own but is part of the Body of Christ.
How does that happen?
Christians believe that Christianity is not
so much a religion as a living relationship with the one true living
God.
It is that transformational love of God at
work in all of us: Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. Unity doesn’t
require uniformity. Being the Church doesn’t require visible unity to
exist. In fact, visible disunity may be a good thing.
Look at countries where they have one
national state church. The only option is “Take it or leave it”. And guess
what? Many people have left it. In some places, it even means that they will
get a tax break! 😊
Your choice in the United States is take it
or go to another church. Or start your own church. This has provided a rich
diversity of Christian life here.
In fact, having many Christian denominations
has produced a religious vitality in the United States that is rarely
duplicated anywhere else in the world. It takes all kinds of churches to reach
all kinds of people.
And yet, we are One Church, the Body of
Christ, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:27,
27 Now you are the body of
Christ and individually members of it.
The Body of Christ has many members
(or parts of the body), and each of has been given a spiritual gift to serve
that Body, but Christ is the head of the Body.
There is a diversity of demographics and
denominations in that body, and we’re all going to be together in heaven, so
now it the time to embody what has already begun in our baptism. Our eternal
life has already started. Let’s live that unity now! How do we do that?
The mayor of Arcadia, California, an
American citizen of Chinese descent recently resigned and has plead guilty to
being an illegal agent of the government of China through her “news” website.
Now, it is feared, all Americans of Chinese
descent will be under suspicion, both actively and passively, and the ignorant
and bigoted will now be emboldened. It is already happening on social media,
especially in Arcadia where people should know better. Many Americans of
Chinese descent will choose to pull back from public life to avoid tension, but
some will stand up for who they are and what they believe.
It is tempting, during periods of stress
such as the world is living in right now, for various social and political
groups to pull back, build barriers against outsiders, and avoid conflict.
We in the Church should be doing the
opposite of pulling back. Now is the time to reach out, to show the
world who we are, to recognize the faith that draws us together and to share
the hope that is in us with one voice.
I watched a video
online by a guy who was talking about the changes that Artificial Intelligence
is bringing to the world.
He hangs out with a
lot of skilled workers who sometimes say that, no matter what, A.I. isn’t going
to affect their work. They say that that a computer isn’t going to lay those
bricks. It’s not going to rewire a house or fix a leaky pipe.
And, he said, he
tells them that they’re right. It’s not going to take their jobs. It’s going to
take the jobs of the middle managers, the information age workers, the
creatives, and the repetitive math workers. It’s going to take the jobs of
those who pay you to work for them. And if they can’t pay you, where will your
job be then?
The key to what is
coming is to make A.I. a tool, and to focus on what makes us human.
Humanity is
connection, it’s living with other human beings, it’s finding our common life
in the Body of Christ and providing what Christians are uniquely called,
equipped and sent to do in every age: to find our unity of existence in
our common relationship with God, for which we were created from the beginning
of time, and for which we were born again.
It’s for living in
our unity of purpose, of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ who restored
that relationship on the cross for all who receive it, and then took his life
back again!
Our message to a
fearful world as we end this Easter Season and then look forward to celebrating
the Day of Pentecost a week from this coming Sunday is this:
Christ is Risen! He
is Risen, Indeed! Alleluia!
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