(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Mass-Blog-for-the-Baptism-of-the-Lord-2025.mp3)
The artificial intelligence era promises news-breaking solutions to the world’s greatest problems. That’s how people saw the coming of the Messiah thousands of years ago—as the advent of earthshattering change!
But as we contemplate the era into which Jesus the Christ was baptized, it seems it was his baptizer who was getting all the attention for acting as a loudmouth who could be heard yelling:
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
Someone yelling such a thing in today’s pop culture desert would be considered a nut. Atheist and political activist Noam Chomsky might be expected to cast that first stone, but he told one interviewer that the people of faith whom he debates have a passion he admires.
“It is people who hold what I regard as completely irrational beliefs who are among the most effective moral actors in the world, in many respects,” he told interviewer Adam Jones in 1990. Among those were Archbishop Oscar Romero and the four U.S. nuns who were killed in El Salvador in 1980 for defending faith against political persecutors.
Fast-forward three decades, and Chomsky now acts as a voice crying out in our cultural wilderness against artificial intelligence. The human mind, he says, is not like ChatGPT, gorging on terabytes of data to generate responses to scientific questions. No, it is an efficient and elegant system operating with small amounts of information. Its goal is “not to infer brute correlations among data points, but to create explanations.”
In this way, atheist Chomsky is an unknowing creationist who stumbled his way into a rational argument for the existence of the Holy Spirit. The same spirit that got Isaiah to tell us how the Messiah would work among us—
–“not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street. A bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench, until he establishes justice on the earth.” (Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7)
Justice has always been hard to establish anywhere on this planet—especially in areas resistant to it. Sunday’s letter from Paul to Titus, for example, carries a calling not unlike the one Romero and those missionaries were voicing in El Salvador: “Make way for the Lord!”
Titus was called to develop the church on the large Mediterranean island of Crete. Paul knew Crete’s society was overrun by godless deceivers and heretics. Yet how does Paul tell Titus to counter those forces? With God’s grace, which saves us and trains us to live—
–“temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope,
the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.” (Titus 2:11-14; 3:4-7)
Paul reminds us that this savior “gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good.”
But even John the Baptist wasn’t sure the Jesus he heard about was the world-changer he was imprisoned for introducing—the one who would quietly and efficiently baptize with the Holy Spirit AND fire. (Luke 3:15-16, 21-22)
If John were baptizing today, he might find his evidence in the fact that a godless man like Noam Chomsky could be drawn away from the loudly rational, artificial intelligence of this world and toward the genuine, irrational wisdom of passionate thought. The fact that the Holy Spirits of Archbishop Romero and those four nuns could kindle a flame in his godless heart proves there’s still hope a conflagration could overtake this lukewarm, rational world.
–Tom Andel
Faith is a gift directly from God. Nothing artifical about it! There is no substitute for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, freely given to those open and desiring to recieve.
The more sophisticated we attempt to become, even letting machines do our thinking for us, can only take us further from the source of all wisdom.
The faith of a child…….
Nothing gets us closer to that faith than habitual prayer. Just as you can’t see our night sky’s heavenly bodies with your unaided eyes when surrounded by the noise of civilization’s artificial lighting, it’s hard to hear the voice of God in the silence of our hearts when surrounded by our world’s artificial enlightenment. The further away we put worldly things, the closer we get to God.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians (Eph. 3:14-19) puts faith and knowledge in their proper perspectives:
“I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”