I'm sure you know the feeling. You need to call your bank or your insurance company or the airline before your next trip. You dial the number. A voice answers. It greets you warmly. It asks how it can help. It responds to your questions with skill. It even may tell a small joke or say something meant to put you at ease. And for a moment it feels like you're speaking to someone. But after a few sentences, you realize there's no one there. The voice on the other end of the line is not a person. It's an algorithm. And that realization lingers for a moment because it isn't just the bank or the airline or the insurance company where we encounter these artificial voices.
Increasingly, we're surrounded by voices that respond, advise, generate, compose, all without ever being embodied in flesh and blood. We live in a world full of these voices. Voices that sound human, that respond intelligently, that seem almost personal. Because for most of human history, we assumed that speech, especially creative, intelligent speech, was uniquely ours. And words felt like the mark of something sacred, something deeply human. And now these words come from somewhere else. And if we're honest, that is disorienting. Not because the technology is evil, not because it doesn't work, but because it touches something deeper. It presses on a quiet assumption we carry about ourselves. But this is not a sermon about artificial intelligence. It's actually a sermon about what it means to be human.
Because if a language model can make us nervous, then perhaps the anxiety is revealing something about us. Perhaps the question is not, “What are machines becoming?” but, “What have we quietly come to believe about ourselves?” Why does it feel like rivalry when a machine can generate what we once thought was uniquely human? And that question leads us back not to Silicon Valley, but to Babel. The story of Babel is often told as a warning about pride. Human beings build too high and God knocks them down. But listen more closely to what the builders actually say in the text. “Let us make a name for ourselves… lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” A name, in Scripture, is not merely reputation. It's identity. It signals stability, generational continuity, a future that carries your story forward. To “make a name” is to secure who you are and who your children will be. It's to establish a legacy across time.
Their fear at Babel is grounded in something deeply human. It's the fear of disappearing, of having our lives scattered into the winds of time, of being forgotten. It's the fear grounded in the truth that we are finite. To be scattered is to be vulnerable. It's to be unprotected, to be dispersed into difference. And when scattered or forgotten, we lose control of the story that we tell about ourselves. So in response, they do what anxious humans have always done. They build. The ancient world is littered with monumental building projects, pyramids rising from the desert sands, ziggurats climbing toward Mesopotamian skies, structures that reached upward as declarations of permanence.
To build a tower was never merely technical. It was symbolic. Towers signaled permanence. Mastery. Civilization. In building a tower, we say: we're not small. We're not fragile. Our legacy will endure. We will set the terms of the story that we tell about ourselves and that we'll be told about us. Often such monuments were tied to a single name — a king, a ruler, a civilization. It was a way of inscribing human achievement into history so that it couldn't be erased. And if you live as I do in a city like New York, you know that that instinct has not disappeared. From the tallest buildings named after figures of renown to campus halls named after donors long gone. We still measure greatness in height and scale and visibility in stone and in steel.
And in our information age, different kinds of towers continue to rise. Digital platforms, vast systems, technologies associated with powerful individuals whose names are meant to endure. We still imagine that scale and innovation can secure significance. So when the people of Babel say, “Let us make a name for ourselves,” they're not merely building upward. They're securing identity through achievement. It's their way of saying, if we can build something large enough, permanent enough, perhaps we can escape our own fragility.
At Babel, humanity defines itself by what it can construct, by what it can produce, by what it can achieve together. And it's really tempting, as we hear this story, a story so familiar to all of us, to assume that the problem here is the thing that they build — the towers, the brick, the system. But I don't think the tower is the problem. I think the anthropology is the problem. In other words, the problem here isn't technology. It's the quiet assumptions that are underneath it. Assumptions like we can secure ourselves. We can define ourselves. We can make our own name.
So if we listen carefully, the story of Babel is not really about towers at all. It's about what the builders believe it means to be human. They believe that a human being is one who can construct, coordinate, and secure. One who can generate something that lasts. One who can make a name that endures. And if we're honest, we live in a world today that is shaped by that very same imagination. We measure worth by our output, by our productivity, by how much we generate and how quickly we do it. And in this kind of world, something subtle happens to us. We begin to believe that our worth is tied to what we can produce. So when a machine can write fluently, can calculate instantly, can compose something that we find beautiful or profound, it unsettles us.
And it's not because the machine is becoming human, but because we have quietly reduced what it means to be human to productivity and intelligence alone. If I am my output, then anything that can outproduce me threatens me. If I'm my productivity, then anything that's more efficient than me can make me really anxious. And in this light, artificial intelligence is not the first tower that humanity has built to secure itself. It's simply the latest one.
The good news of the biblical story is that God does not leave humanity to its own reductions. Again and again, precisely at those moments when we forget who we are, God acts not to punish or shame, but to correct, to liberate, to redeem and to free. And among the many ways that God does this, the story of Pentecost is one of the most direct and dynamic. Pentecost interrupts Babel not by undoing it, but by revealing what Babel forgot. Now, many Pentecost sermons draw the familiar parallel: At Babel, language divides us; at Pentecost, language unites us. And there is a lot of truth in that parallel. But I think something deeper is happening here. Pentecost does more than solve a communication problem. It interrupts a certain logic that says, “Let us make.” It interrupts that imagination that defines us by our achievement. It interrupts that instinct to secure ourselves. Because at Pentecost, the story is no longer about humanity making its way up to heaven. It's about heaven coming down to us.
And when heaven arrives, what is formed is not uniformity. The Spirit doesn't collapse difference into a single language. It doesn't centralize control. It doesn't erase plurality. Instead, the Spirit creates space for each to hear in their own language. And in this space, difference remains and particularity remains and plurality remains. And yet something fundamentally changes. Speech is no longer self-securing. It becomes self-giving. Community is no longer coerced. It becomes communion. It is often said that Pentecost is the birthday of the church, and while that makes for a tidy sermon, it's too small for what's happening here.
Pentecost is not merely the beginning of an institution, it's the unveiling of a new way of being human. More than tongues of fire resting on a few heads, the giving of the Spirit signals the beginning of a humanity infused with the very life of God. And when that life enters into us, something is reconstituted. A humanity no longer defined by achievement, but by reception. No longer secured by towers, but gathered by God by gift. We're no longer anxious about being scattered, but we're drawn together in vulnerable communion. The Spirit is not given to make us more productive. The Spirit is given to make us new.
So to return to the question of artificial intelligence that I raised at the beginning of this sermon, what does all of this mean in an age like ours? It means that the deepest question before us is not really technological. It's theological. If intelligence were the heart of humanity, if productivity were the measure of our worth, if fluency were the core of our identity, then yes, we'd have a reason to be anxious. But Pentecost tells us a different story. Pentecost reveals that what it means to be human is not exhausted by what we can produce.
What makes us human is that we are addressed by God, drawn into communion and able to give ourselves away in love. And this is the image of God. Not mere intelligence. Not mere capacity, but participation in divine life. It’s gift instead of achievement. Self-giving instead of coercion and vulnerability instead of self securing. Artificial intelligence doesn't threaten the image of God. It exposes how thin our imagination of that image has become. And perhaps in that sense, AI is not only a disruption, but an invitation. An invitation to remember who we are. We're not towers under construction. We're not names that we have to secure. We're not productivity that we must defend. But we are creatures gathered by the Spirit. Creatures made alive by gift. Creatures whose deepest worth is not what we build, but what we receive. And in a world filled with voices, Pentecost reminds us that we are more than what we make. And we are more than what we fear. We are communion. Amen.