September 21, 2025 – Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Jeremiah 29.4-7, 11-14

Mark 2.23-28

There’s An App For That

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

If an article on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times is any indication, there is a good chance I may be out of a job in the not-too-distant future.  And not just me, but many mainline clergy, not just in the US, but around the world.  And not just mainline clergy, but Roman Catholic clergy as well.  And not just Christian clergy, but those of other faiths, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and beyond.  The article is titled, Finding God in the App Store, and it describes the world-wide proliferation of religious apps for your phone and other internet connected devices, that cut out the middleman, or middlewoman, as it were, and go straight to the source:  God themself.

A combination of app and AI generated chatbots, these shortcuts are designed for religious-minded consumers to ask questions about their faith, to go to confession without having your priest recognize your voice, look up favorite Bible verses and have them explained, seek solutions to complicated moral dilemmas, find spiritual guidance, seek last rites, create personalized rosaries, and engage in a host of other spiritual disciplines once reserved for clergy.

And frankly, I understand.  With fewer and fewer folks attending services of any kind, it stands to reason that a spiritual void of sorts would begin to develop.  Hunam beings are spiritual persons regardless of our level of religious engagement or disengagement, and when we cease to pay attention to our souls’ deeper hunger, we begin to get restive and look elsewhere, somewhere, anywhere, for spiritual succor and support.  And in our digital, online, perpetually connected and somewhat depersonalized age, it is natural for us to turn to the devices we hold in our hands and already use to engage in so much human commerce, that religion has become another commodity to be marketed and consumed remotely.

Now don’t get me wrong.  This is not one of those sermons that complains about the woes of a church in a world that seems to be passing it by.  Nor do I mean to belittle anyone who has downloaded a religious app because it is more convenient or satisfies a need for the user.  The church does itself no favors when it bemoans the latest technology that seems to be usurping the church’s former prerogative.  I am sure Johannes Gutenberg received his share of nasty emails when the printing press was invented, bypassing completely the laity’s need to have the scriptures read to them by the educated clergy.  You cannot slow down technology and you cannot halt progress, and the church that tries not only wastes its energy, but tacitly admits its own irrelevance.  I think it is much more helpful to understand and interpret the newest and latest, to find the needs they fill, and then, when possible, find ways to fill them better.  Because I think we can.

One of Jesus’ earliest and most astute observations occurs in the second chapter of Mark’s gospel.  After the Pharisees accused his disciples of profaning the sabbath by engaging in work, in this case picking grain because they were hungry, Jesus replied, “The sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath.”  Which is to say the rites of the church are intended for our benefit, not for our blind obedience to ritual.  I think this is a useful way of understanding the latest technologies that have the appearance of encroaching on the church’s long-established practices and customs.  If a tool exists that makes it a little easier for someone to pray, maybe someone who doesn’t think they have the right words, or who hasn’t prayed for a long time, well, what harm is there?   If you have a random Bible question but aren’t certain how to phrase it – which, not so incidentally, is something that happens to me with regularity – then maybe AI can help you phrase your question in such a way that clarifies what you actually want to know.  If you’d like to get into a habit or routine of spiritual meditation, well, it just may be there’s an app for that, and good habits are not always easy to come by.  Let’s face it, for a variety of reasons a lot of folks are not comfortable walking into a church anymore, and as much as we do our best to be welcoming and accessible, it’s just not for everyone.  And what could be wrong about wanting to become a more grounded, spiritual, mindful person?

Because what do apps do?  Not all of them are anodyne, but many of them help us navigate a complicated world.  I hit a stretch of bad traffic the other day coming home from Maine, so I touched my dashboard screen, a new direction home immediately appeared, and as a result I traveled roads I never before knew existed, but got me out of traffic and delivered me home a lot sooner than otherwise.  Our apps can get groceries delivered to our door, help us create entire vacations without the use of an agent, they alert me when something happens in my neighborhood, they alarm me when one of my credit or bank cards has suspicious activity, they maintain an annotated album of all my photographs since the early aughts, they tell me if I need to carry an umbrella when I leave the house, they suggest a good book I might want to read, they bring me music from all over the world.  I even have an app that helps me tune my violin, which means that when you hear a wrong note, alas, it is not the instrument that is to blame.

But the fact remains they have their limitations, some of them serious.  Even in the age of artificial intelligence, one of the original rules of computing still applies:  the acronym GIGO, which stands for “garbage in, garbage out.”  So long as human beings are the ones inputting information and designing and programing our devices, something is bound to go sideways.  An app called “Bible Chat” bills itself as the #1 faith-based app in the world and is based in Romania.  While it can perform functions like finding specific verses, explaining Bible personalities and answering, or at least replying to questions about God and faith and the church, it is based on the King James Version of the Bible which may in some ways be useful, but is more than 500 years old.  It lures you in with a free version, but you’ll soon find yourself paying for features you may or may not need.  In other words, like every other for-profit app.   At least an app called “Jesus AI” is honest right up front:  it carries the prominent disclaimer, “This app may contain inaccuracies and biases,” though it won’t tell you what they are.  Another app, “Chat with God,” tries to answer perplexing questions like “Why am I poor and other people are rich?” and “How can I deal with the loss of a loved one?”  But it has the uncomfortable habit of beginning each reply with the words, “My child,” and ends with little more than a vapid platitude dressed in religious garb:  My child, life’s circumstances are often a test of our spirit.  My child, everything happens for a reason.  My child, prayer is a conversation with the divine.  But “Chat with God” does earn extra points, in my book, by being an interfaith endeavor, creatively switching among allusions to the Quran, the Bible, the Torah and the Bhagavad-Gita.  Other apps – many of them, in fact – use masculine pronouns exclusively for both God and humanity, which would exclude much of our own congregation, while others are transparently sectarian, appealing to a slice of the religious population.  Examples include a Roman Catholic app, multiple conservative and evangelical apps, and Asian apps that lean more toward fortune-telling than religion.

But I think that one of the biggest drawbacks is that by their very nature, most religious apps imply an authority that none of them possesses.  Chat with God admits as much by revealing the question asked most often by its users, a question that at once amuses, puzzles and alarms me; the question is, “Is this really God I am talking to?”   If you’re sitting in the pew on Sunday morning, or Friday night, or Saturday afternoon, one look at the front of the room will remind you in no uncertain terms that this is not God you are listening to.

“In no uncertain terms” is also a useful caveat, I think, about the use of religious apps.  While they may give the impression of certainty – here’s the question and here’s the answer – you and I understand that the dynamics of faith include, and I would go so far as to say require, room for uncertainty.  We are meant to figure some things out for ourselves.  I have long believed that the task of the church, the task of the preacher, is not to provide answers to life’s perplexing questions, but rather to provide us with tools for finding our answers for ourselves.  An artificially intelligent app may well be one of many tools in my religious toolbox to help me come to grips with how I might live out my faith, but if it is the only tool – even if it is an entire toolbox of apps – it falls far short of all the world has to offer.  If it keeps my eyes on the screen rather than on the world around me, the glory of a day like today, the company and comfort of friends and the serendipity of a chance interaction with a stranger, then it blinkers us at the precise moment our eyes and our hearts need most to be open.  There is no app for that.  (Not yet, anyway.)