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When I was in college, I spent two years tutoring prisoners in Cell Block One at Cook County Correctional Facility on the south side of Chicago. Once a week I’d make my way into that ominous, imposing building. Every time the guards treated me as if I were new, even though they saw me regularly I was roughed through the security gauntlet to get in.
Cell Block One housed the men considered most dangerous. I’d meet with one of them in a small, special room for 45 minutes. We’d read together. We’d talk. Then the time was up. He was escorted away, and I walked back out through the gauntlet.
Here’s what struck me: life in prison is designed to be frictionless. Everything is scheduled. Everything is ordered. Even where you walk is marked out on the ground. It may sound strange, but that is what a life without freedom looks like: smooth, predictable, frictionless… by design.
And yet, we know prisons to be unsafe places, which calls forth for us the paradox that sits between the pursuit of a frictionless architecture, and the rebellion it inspires.
I think we are sitting on a rising impulse of rebellion, and I believe the church, maybe even this church, may be a prime voice in the conversation between freedom and the frictionless society. Today I’d like to invite us to consider where we sit in this tension.
On the one side there is Club Med, where it’s all piña coladas and pool sides; where we turn to order and they just add it to our card. Where groceries show up at our door when the computer in our refrigerator determines we need more yogurt. Where bills are automatically paid, and Netflix picks the next movie. Where we push a button and a car arrives, or a delivery appears. And if we are feeling lonely a “perfect” companion is just a click away on Replika, Soulmate AI, or my favorite title, Anima AI. There we meet a special friend with whom we can feel perfectly safe, perfectly at ease; no twitch of the eye, no tilt of the head, no intonation of the voice, no history, no friction.
This is not an accident. Technology companies have stated outright that their goal is to give us a frictionless life. Microsoft’s head of their AI division, Mustafa Suleyman, describes AI companions that have names, appearances, and memory, ones that “live life alongside us,” seamlessly and continuously present.
Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Replika envisions AI friends that are always available, always affirming, so frictionless that she has suggested some people may even marry them.
The message is clear: friction is bad, the easy is good, and the best future is the effortless one. But here’s what they don’t tell us, without friction, there is no freedom. Life without friction is imbued with the same architectural impulse as those who designed Cell Block One.
I am reminded of Richard Fleisher’s 1973 movie Soylent Green… and the scene where the protagonist Detective Thorn (played by Charlton Heston) discovered that “Soylent Green is people.”
I’ve been in the corporate world, and as many of you are. It is a good place to make a living, so I don’t want you to hear me saying that business and technology is inherently predatory. What I hope you hear is the message Jesus delivers to us today.
There is a shepherd out in the wilderness with 100 sheep. That’s a pretty big flock for one person.
Then one goes missing. Kudos to the shepherd for even noticing! But of course he notices, because he knows his sheep by name. So he begins the search.
He wanders down valleys, over rocky terrain, trying to figure out where that confused little lamb has gone. He walks in circles, pushing out further and further so as not to head in the wrong direction. Five miles. Six miles. One day. Two days. Along the way, he has to find food and water. He must. He’s exhausted, and all the while, worried about the 99 sheep he left behind.
His sandal breaks. He falls, scrapes his knee, gets tangled in brambles.
Maybe he even has to fend off a mountain lion with his sling, hoping the little lamb hasn’t already become dinner.
Then, in the midst of the tension, the trauma, the pain, the fear, the waiting, the friction, he hears it: the cry of the lamb. He races toward the sound, finding the silly creature down in a ravine, turned around.
And what does he do? He swoops it up, tosses it onto his shoulders, starts back, but not to the other sheep in the wilderness, but to the community; to his people. Back to the village, where relationship and care is to be found. Where his wounds can be tended. Where someone can fix his broken sandal. But most importantly where he can tell his story.
He goes back to the community, because in the Kingdom of God relationship is primary.
That’s what we say here at Epiphany: in the Kingdom of God relationship is primary.
But Jesus adds something to this aphorism, he adds the spice of rebellion to deepen our understanding that while relationship is primary friction is also necessary.
Friction is what transforms us. It is the sandpaper that forms the wood; it is the tumbler that polishes the stone; it is the fire that hardens the steel; it is the heat and pressure that turns coal into diamonds. It is the suffering that produces endurance, the endurance that produces character, the character that produces hope. There is no hope if there is no friction. There is no freedom if there is no friction; and if there is no freedom then there is no love. And if there’s no love, there is no God.
We are freedom fighters, because we know there is a God, and we know that there is love, and we know that there is hope, and so we stand as rebels willingly rubbed, polished, hardened, heated, pressured for the sake of one sheep, for the sake of one soul.
That is the paradox; on the one hand prioritizing relationship and the willing acceptance of the friction that unfolds, over and against the promise of a frictionless society. Or, to think of it another way: incarnation versus anti-incarnation.
That’s what we’re up against… And it is not easy to make the argument that friction is better; that suffering is OK, and even necessary for transformation.
That the twitch of the eye, the tilt of the head, the intonation of the voice, the history, the friction, is preferable to an AI companion that pops up on the screen like a genie out of bottle to make our dreams come true. Frictionless encounter is anti-incarnational engagement that leads to life in Cell block one.
I live in this paradox, tempted by the allure of a streamlined life. I’m as big a fan as the next guy in having a fob to help me find my keys. I probably should get one for my coffee cup as well.
Technology can free us up to do other things. That’s OK! But it can also suck us into the vortex of the anti-incarnational where profound loneliness can lurk.
That’s what I’m calling us to be on the lookout for — the unintended consequences of a frictionless life. The pressure is immense and ubiquitous. We’re up against industry after industry after industry that is seeking to create a frictionless life for us, which, intentionally or unintentionally, can imprison us in an anti-incarnational box.
Instead, consider Jesus as your leader in the rebellion; after all, he allowed the hardwood of the cross to rub raw his shoulders as he climbed Golgotha… there is no freedom if there is no friction. Or shall I say there is no resurrection if there is no cross.
The entire theology of Christianity is built on the friction of the cross as the necessary path to resurrection; which is maybe why Christianity, writ large, is shrinking – friction is required, suffering is sanctified, endurance is sought if we are to be people of hope.
Now, it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that there is a distinction between the friction of dynamic, living relationships and relational dominance and abuse. That type of rub is not okay. That is evil. Always disengage the bully.
But what I’m talking about is regular relationship as radical rebellion against the creeping spread of invasive isolation found in the gravitational pull of a screen.
In this world, Epiphany is a place of rebellion. You know how I know? Because despite my best efforts to craft my sermon into a liturgical Neuralink where my words firmly adhere to your brains in a way that creates both perfect recall and decisive action… Some of your minds still wander during the sermon! For some my message may provoke cognitive dissidents. Some of you even disagree with what I say!
This is just one little example of what makes Epiphany inherently a place of rebellion: because it is a place where we meet face-to-face, soul to soul: where relationship is primary;
where we come together week in and week out, year in and year out, to a place where we practice the incarnational life. Here relationship is primary and friction is necessary.
Incarnation run us through the gauntlet, and we’re better for it. Which is why it is the cross that we pick up knowing with faith, by experience, through wisdom that it is the cross that gets us to resurrection. It is the cross that symbolizes our freedom. It is the cross that represents God’s love, knowing fully well that resurrection is just around the corner.
Or to say Resurrection another way: that the bad thing is never the last thing… which is why in the kingdom of God relationship is primary and friction is necessary.