All Saints’, Dorval
April 4, 2026
Russian icon of the Anastasis, c. 1700, Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht. Wikimedia Commons.
As you know if you were here on the third Sunday of Advent, I am not a fan of AI, at least not the “large language models” that power apps like Claude and ChatGPT and which are getting most of the attention these days.
The other day, I was fighting with someone on the internet on this topic, as one does, and trying to get across to them that it is impossible for what is basically a super fancied-up autocomplete to think or learn or be creative, and they kept coming back at me with statements like: “Your brain is constantly predicting everything that every neuron of every sense is feeding back. You predict you’ll hear a given set of pitches, based on a prediction that you’ll hear a given word, based on predictions of where a sentence is headed, and on and on.”
Which is true, as far as it goes, but also is the opposite of the argument they thought they were making. What they were describing is exactly what I’m talking about when I (and lots of other people far smarter than me!) describe an LLM as a glorified autocomplete! It is, indeed, in the business of prediction, and incapable of doing anything else!
And human creativity is precisely the defiance of prediction. It is setting up that next expected word, that next expected pitch, that next expected plot point, and then doing something completely different. And that is what an LLM is definitionally incapable of doing.
As the SF writer Ann Leckie posted on Bluesky literally as I was drafting this sermon, “A chatbot is always going to produce a statistically likely sentence. It is always going to tell you what’s routine, likely, ‘normal.’ It will not help you break out of cliche. It’s MADE of things-already-said. It cannot say anything particularly new.”
The AI rant stops there (I’m sure you’re relieved).
But as I thought about why this made me so mad, I realized that it’s not just about human creativity – although that insult is more than enough to be outraged about! It’s because this is also how God works (which is not a coincidence, of course, since all our creativity is in the image of God’s). God is perpetually in the business of defying our expectations, of acting in ways we could not possibly have anticipated.
And tonight’s service reflects that on two levels. Well, at least two levels. Probably an infinity of levels, but you can’t fit that into a short sermon.
The first level is the classic and delightful cheat-the-devil theology of the Harrowing of Hell, which Tenny just read us again: [Hell] laid hold of a mortal body, and found that it had seized God! It laid hold of earth, but confronted heaven!! It seized what it saw, but CRUMBLED before what it had not seen!!!
The Devil saw a dead human being, a prize that belonged to him, and couldn’t imagine a different ending to the story. Dead person goes down to Sheol, stays there forever, no alternative. Well, boy did the Devil get a surprise! And it’s always fun to gloat over the Devil’s fury when Jesus not only pulls off the jailbreak, but brings everyone else along for the ride.
But there’s also a subtler way in which this service shows us how God defies our expectations.
Because the Easter Vigil does actually show us a pattern that encourages us to make a prediction about how God will act. We hear all the oldest and most beloved stories: God creating the world, saving Noah from the flood, bringing the people through the Red Sea, preserving Jonah in the belly of the whale, raising the dry bones, bringing the people triumphantly home. If you were an LLM given these prompts, you might concoct a peculiar mishmash of a bunch of animated skeletons on an ark with a whale while the Red Sea is divided (and they all have seven fingers). And even a human author might come up with another story of God’s power and love that was more or less like the first ones.
But because God is God and not an LLM, or even a human, God doesn’t do any of that. God does something that is absolutely consistent with God’s mighty deeds of the past – but that could not possibly have been predicted by any observer (even as, once it has happened, we can go back and search the old stories and discover hints and resonances there). God became human and did battle with the powers of death and vanquished them once and for all. The ending to this story was far more than we could ever have imagined.
And perhaps that is what we need to be reminded of, this Easter night: that God is literally in the business of bringing good out of evil. No prediction based on past performance could ever have anticipated these future results. Where humanity’s raw material can provide only death and hopelessness, Jesus steps in and turns things upside down, turning our defeat into triumph, death into life, and sorrow into joy.
May we, with the risen Christ, embrace what makes us weird and unexpected and joyfully human, and seek ways to bring out of predictable ugliness and despair, the surprising goodness and beauty of God’s new life.
Amen.
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