Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2025

How good do you think you are at discerning what is real and what is not? It’s a question that is increasingly important to us with the rise of AI and various forms of generated content. Pouring over pictures, videos, texts… trying to work out whether it’s just odd enough in just the right way that a human could not have made this. When people often had a strange number of limbs in images, it seemed pretty easy – but the speed at which AI is getting better at generating things that fool us, I find genuinely frightening. In a study done just in July by Microsoft, 12,500 humans could tell AI-generated images from human-generated images just 62% of the time. It’s becoming a coin toss at this point, which has terrifying implications for the spread of misinformation in a world that is divided and increasingly filled with hate and fear-driven conflict, and with power wielded by those who know all too well how to exploit these tools.  The opposite is also scary: as the world outside gets harder to bear, retreating into the cosiness of the screen. Living vicariously through those who capture us with their (literally) picture-perfect lives; whose curated tribulations draw us into parasocial relationships, and who end up dictating what we drink, what we eat, what we wear, because ultimately, it’s all about what we buy. There absolutely are influential people in the digital world that care about their communities, and there are communities that spring up around those people that love and care for each other, and I think we do know in our heart-of-hearts that we don’t actually know the person on the screen, but we have also seen the consequences. People being influenced to do terrible things, doxxing, comment wars, and at least three social-media creators have been killed in the last five years, with many others threatened or harmed by obsessive fans.

We increasingly move in a haze of unreality, spilling over into the arenas of our media that we should be able to trust the most. Though there are signs that we recognise how bad this is for us. A British Standards Institution study in May revealed that 46% of young people aged 16-21 would rather be young in a world without the internet. Personally, I find that rather heartbreaking. But where do we go to find that reality: un-generated, unfiltered, connection without commerce, relationship beyond price?

‘See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity’

Our Old Testament reading in Deuteronomy is pretty direct. God’s Covenant is being renewed with the people at Moab, and they (and us) are given a stark choice. If we love the Lord our God, obey him and hold fast to him, then we are choosing life. If our hearts turn away and we do not hear him, we shall perish. What we are offered in our faith is nothing less than life in Jesus Christ. That life is not one based on commercial transaction, or a relationship formed by cutting off the bits that you don’t want people to see. A life that is not recycled endlessly from our own content and the content of others, but one in which all things flow from him who is the ground of our being; endlessly creating, endlessly creative. Jesus says it himself: ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ The difficult thing, the oh-so difficult thing, is that life is hard.

Jesus knew this. Jesus, born in a stable, a refugee into Egypt, who saw in his ministry pain, suffering, hunger, disease and death, who did nothing wrong and yet was tortured and killed, knows that life is hard. Christianity doesn’t shy away from that fact or try to package an alternate reality in which you will always be safe, in control, and everything is fine. ‘The poor will always be with you,’ Jesus says, and it is built into the fabric of this Abbey Church. Just above your heads in the North Transept are a series of windows that remind us of the mercies we are expected to show: clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and in prison. Instead of offering that alternate reality, what Jesus offers is nothing more or less than himself: God poured out in love that (as our collect says) we can neither desire nor deserve into really human flesh. As Rowan Williams puts it: ‘In the life of Jesus we see all of that vast infinite eternal reality happening in a human life… that prosaic, everyday picture of Middle Eastern peasant life is where God happens in the world, where the love of God becomes absolutely real and active.’ We are called to follow the reality of God into life, and when that life is hard, he promises to be with us.

‘See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity’

It is a choice that we are offered, and it is a choice we have to actively make. If you think our Old Testament reading was uncompromising, Jesus is just as direct in the Gospel. Jesus turns to the crowd and tells them that they have to do three things to be a disciple: hate their family, carry the cross and give up all their possessions. It’s a wake-up call to a crowd that is already following him. They have liked and subscribed, and now expect to automatically be served content. But this is not enough. Christianity is not a passive faith in which you can just sit back and absorb, but one in which you have to actively make the choice to put Jesus above everything else. Just as life is hard, this is hard: that’s why Jesus starts talking about people building towers or kings going to wars. He’s not interested in blind commitment, or an eyes-shut accidental wandering after him, but a realistic commitment to the reality of God-with-us. Life-giving, loving, all-giving, all-consuming faith. It is not easy, but it’s what gives us life.

Our reality is that we are loved by God who is really with us – present in his Word, in the bread and the wine that we will really eat, present in one another. We are called to make a commitment to that love, to life lived abundantly with our eyes wide open, knowing that things will be hard, but when they are, our wounded saviour is with us. Jesus doesn’t offer an alternative reality filled with fake images and emotions, and which is ultimately entirely transactional. What Jesus offers is this: all of us together at Westminster Abbey this morning, with our joys and loves and pains and fears, not separate from the world outside these walls but bringing it here to offer up before him. All of us together, and himself in our midst.