I’ve never done a sermon / book report hybrid, but that’s pretty much what this will be.  World Communion Sunday during a series on peace felt like a good time to hear from the pope.  The fact that AI has occupied the headlines for much of the last month makes it all the more timely.  How we relate with these increasingly powerful technologies has become one of the key questions of what it means to be human.

So embodied peace must mean something more than simply feeling relaxed. Sometimes our bodies should be disturbed by what is happening around us. Sometimes anger is an appropriate bodily response to injustice. Sometimes fear is telling us that something needs our attention. And so the work is not to become disembodied people who don’t feel those things.

[Thank you to Imam Horsed Noah, Outreach Director of Abubakar Mosque, for bringing us this message during our Courageous Peace Witness worship series.]

And so we are saved not just from personal wrongdoings, but we are saved from this whole way of building a false peace. We are saved from needing to cast out anyone. We are saved from scapegoating. We are saved from building crosses and preserving our own power by putting others on them. As the apostle Paul wrote over and over again, it is something within us that needs to be crucified, so we can stop projecting it onto someone else. And it is through that death of the old way of being that we are raised with Christ and become part of a new creation.