Choices and Changes

The scriptures referred to are Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32, Philippians 2:1-13 and Matthew 21:23-32.

In his book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow explains why AI is being pushed on us and why the companies creating it overhype what it can actually do. It's because investors pour much more money into companies that appear to be growing than boring mature companies with steady but unexciting returns. So the claim that AI is inevitable and will replace most jobs is just a sales pitch. Still Doctorow admits that AI can do some tasks faster or more efficiently than humans. It can do some things as well as humans. For instance, he says, it could easily predict his wife's reaction to just about anything as well as he could. Because people repeat themselves. It could analyze all her reactions, notice patterns and be able to use probability to make predictions. Unless she said something like “I want a divorce.” Because AI can't predict what has never happened before. It's trained on the accumulated data that presently exists. What AI offers is basically a compilation or a summary or a mashup of what is already out there. Doctorow says it's basically a glorified search engine, the embodiment of all the comment sections on the internet. Even the scary things it does, like hack other companies, lie and make up things when it doesn't know, are simply AI imitating what it's learned that humans do. Because machines can't generate original thoughts.

It is true that in general if you know what people have consistently done in the past, you can reasonably predict what they will do in the future. Reasonably but not reliably. Think political polls. If you could know what people would do with absolute certainty, psychology would be a hard science like physics. Nothing people did would ever surprise us. But they can. Because people can change their minds. If they couldn't, advertising would be useless. No one would ever change their brand of car or toothpaste or their political party. People would never change their religion. Social scientists know that even when they can predict what large groups of people will do, they can't predict what any one individual within a group will do. And that person might come up with an original idea that will persuade others to change their minds and change society.

For decades people have debated whether our personalities and behaviors are determined by nature or nurture. Studies show that the personalities of identical twins differ by as much as 30 to 60%. A major DNA study by the UK Biobank shows that specific genetic markers only account for between 13 and 16% of differences. Other differences come from a person's environment and life events, including things like friendships. The point is that we are not machines who do everything because we are programmed by our DNA or even by our upbringing. We can change.

Which is the reason, I hope, that we are all here. If people can't change then a key idea in Christianity is nonsense. Jesus' message, according to Mark, was “The time has come...The kingdom of God is near. Repent, and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) The Greek word translated “repent” literally means “to think differently afterwards.” And Jesus got people to rethink what a Messiah was like. Jesus was not a king, at least not the kind they were used to. He was not a warrior, though some probably thought he would eventually become one. He was not a priest, another of the popular ideas of what the Messiah would be. What he turned out to be was a healer, a preacher and a teacher. Jesus changed people's sick bodies into healthy ones and he also changed their minds by changing the way they saw God and our relationship with him.

It was popularly thought that there were two kinds of people: the righteous and the sinners. Jews like the Pharisees, who scrupulously observed the Jewish laws, both the ones written in the Torah and the oral laws rabbis derived from them, were considered righteous. Jews who weren't observant, or those who collected taxes for the Romans, or who were prostitutes or criminals, and sometimes even those who were disabled, like the man born blind, were considered sinners. Yet there were zealous Pharisees who thought that if they could get all Jews to obey the Torah perfectly for just one day, the Messiah would come. But that requires repentance. And it's hard to persuade people to repent if you avoid interacting with those you see as sinners in order to preserve your ritual purity, as religious leaders of that time did. Eating and sharing table fellowship with sinners, as Jesus did, implied friendship and was seen as endorsing their lifestyle.

Repentance is a theme we find over and over in the prophets. God tells Ezekiel, “...when the wicked turn away from the wickedness they have committed and do what is lawful and right, they shall save their life. Because they considered and turned away from all the transgressions they had committed, they shall surely live; they shall not die.” (Ezekiel 18:27-28) God says people can change. And by the way, the Hebrew word for “turn away” or “turn back” can also be translated “repent.” Because turning your life around, turning away from sin and turning to God is at the heart of repentance.

The fact that we can change our minds and turn from what is morally and spiritually harmful to what is morally and spiritually healthy is a big reason for hope. While it is difficult to change your bad habits, it is not impossible. Not even when it comes to something like addiction. 31 million people, 9.1% of American adults, have had various addictions and yet have managed to beat them. The odds do differ with each particular substance. About 35 to 36% of people treated for alcoholism manage to remain sober. Smoking is harder with 8 to 9% managing to quit for good. Still that means people do manage to kick these habits. First, you have to decide that you are going to be one of those people who beats the odds. And then you need to seek help. Because overall 40 to 60% of people treated for a substance abuse disorder achieve long-term sobriety. And after 5 years, the likelihood of a relapse falls to 15% or less. For those who seek treatment, recovery looks more like the rule rather than the exception.

But nobody simply drifts into changing long established ways of doing things. You have to make a decision. And then you have to act on it. In Jesus' parable, the two brothers say different things when their father asks them to work in their vineyard. One refuses but later changes his mind and does what his father asked him to do. The other says he will but doesn't actually do it. Jesus is addressing his critics, the chief priests and elders of the people. They talk the talk but do not walk the walk. They proclaim their love for God and for their neighbor with their lips but they don't show it with their lives. As Jesus says elsewhere, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.” (Matthew 23:23) In the parallel passage in Luke, he also mentions “the love of God.” (Luke 11:42) These are the things Jesus says are more important. And yet even today we have so-called Christians who elevate certain religious practices, like saying “Merry Christmas” and wearing crosses, while they simultaneously ignore matters of justice or showing mercy or demonstrating faithfulness to Christian principles or reflecting the love of God towards others. It astounds me that people can quote John 3:16 which says that “God so loved the world” while showing no love for a large percentage of the people of the world.

In our passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians, he also advocates a change of mind. He tells Christians to “do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interest of others.” If all of us were to do that, everybody's interests would be taken care of. However, this means everyone needs to “be of the same mind.” And that mind is the one “that was in Christ Jesus.” Paul then quotes what we think was an early Christian hymn about Jesus, “who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on the cross.” I like J.B. Phillips translation which says that Jesus, “who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his privileges as God's equal, but stripped himself of every advantage by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born a man. And, plainly seen as a human being, he humbled himself by living a life of utter obedience, to the point of death, and the death he died was that of a common criminal.”

Paul's point is that our change of mind is not merely from doing wrong to doing right but to being like Jesus, who gave up everything he had going for him as God in order to become one of us, acting as a humble slave, not to his own interests, but to what was in our best interest: our salvation. As Jesus himself said, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45)

Unfortunately, the church has often changed its mindset to that of the world, using its metrics to decide what successfully carrying out its mission should look like. We determine how well a church is doing by measuring its budget and its membership and its average attendance. When megachurch pastors write books on how to grow a church, they become bestsellers in the Christian market. I'm not saying those things are unimportant but more important is a church's impact on its community and on individuals. After all, Jesus never preached in a megachurch or a stadium. The biggest city he ever visited was Jerusalem, which had an estimated population of 20,000 to 50,000 people, or somewhere around the population of Key West, or at its upper limits, with the populations of Marathon and Key Largo thrown in. Paul says that the risen Jesus appeared to over 500 followers. (1 Corinthians 15:6) They would fill a mid-sized church today. But Jesus' impact on the world was huge. There are Christians in nearly every country on earth, including ones where they have to meet secretly. More books have been written about Jesus than any other individual in human history. And as historian Tom Holland has shown, Christianity has changed the values we think society should hold, like the inherent worth of every individual and the moral obligation of the powerful to help those who are vulnerable, sick or poor. It's even influenced secular movements which seek to spread and realize those values in the world.

As I said, the ability of humans to change their minds, values and actions gives us hope. We are not merely computers made of meat or robots made of muscles and bones. We can transcend our heritable personality traits. We can break away from the environments in which we were raised. We are more than just clever animals who must prioritize our personal survival over larger, fiercer predators. Instead, we can use our God-given gifts to make the world better for all, serving others as Christ does.

But change can work both ways. There are those who wish the world would change back into one where might makes right, where the rich and powerful get more and more and where sympathy and resources are not to be wasted on the less fortunate. They wish to restore the type of empire that had people like Jesus crucified. They want a world where kings and emperors are worshiped as gods. And they are hard at work making that happen.

N.T. Wright has said that churches should act as small working models of the kingdom of God. We should demonstrate that humility is better than delusions of grandeur, that serving others is better than demanding to be served, and that love is better than either hatred or indifference. We should show in our lives that all people have inherent worth because they were created in God's image and because Jesus died to save them. And we can only do this if we don't merely say we will do these things but actually go out into the vineyard and put them into practice. And we must do so even when the odds seem to be against us. Because as Paul said, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31) After all, we are followers of one who was killed in the most horrible way by the most powerful empire in the world at that time. Yet not even death could stop him. That empire is gone; his message, the good news of God acting in Christ and in us, endures. Will we let the empty promises and hype of those with temporary earthly powers cause us to turn away from following Jesus? Or will we use our God-given ability to change lead us to choose and implement what is better for us, for the world and for the glory of the God who is love?