Jesus Meets the Metaverse

Reflection given at Memorial United Methodist Church:

Friends … it’s a joy to be here with you, I am humbled by the love and grace that fills this beautiful space.

Let’s go back to 1995, when someone told you about this “internet thing,” how you’d be able to connect with people, all over the world, instantly, a bit like Star Trek.

At first, maybe your mind was blank. The internet? … What’s that?

Well it’s 1995 again, and something even bigger is on the horizon — the Metaverse. And it’s about to change the world even more than the internet and social media.

And we here at Memorial, along with congregations from around the world, have an urgent, urgent question to ask:

What happens when Jesus meets the Metaverse?

Well for one thing you’re all really good looking.

Now this is what’s really far out. The metaverse is a spiritual medium. And that means, instead of words and metaphors, you can see everything, in 3 dimensions.

Which means, you’ll be able to go into this … expanded reality … and say Jesus, Paul, Hildegaard, Teresa, Chardin, Rumi, Buddha — show me my better angels.

Show me the me I want to be.

Show me the me who responds to

• cruelty with compassion
• to uncertainty with wisdom
• to adversity with hope.

Show me the me who knows how to be content in any situation, the me who acts justly, loves mercy, and walks humbly, the me who is strong and of good courage, and fearless.

And show me the me who every day wakes up and does his very best to cultivate the fruit of the spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, humility, devotion, and self control.

And why not?

Already, right now, anything you can speak, anything you can imagine, you can create an image so real, so convincing, your brain won’t know the difference.

You want to see a green gorilla eating a red banana while doing a headstand in Orlando’s living room? — just say the word, and there it is.

But for what purpose?

They’re using this technology, right now, for porn. For addiction. For war. And for promoting anxiety and civil unrest.

The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson said, “The real problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”

And as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood … but not yet a brotherhood.”

Friends, the church has always spoken prophetically, and if you will allow me to speak prophetically, for a generation we sat on the sidelines … and let the manufacturers of these technologies throw us into an arena .. in which even good people find themselves rooting for their favorite gladiator.

But we … as the prophetic voice of history … this time, in the 2020s … we are called to create a garden of love so real, so convincing, that our brains won’t know the difference.

We can do what no generation ever dreamed of doing.

We can progress not just on the outside, but on the inside.

And we can create not just a metaverse … but an (inner)Verse.

Even we, little humble Memorial in White Plains, New York, we carry a torch, the torch of Good News, the torch of the beatitudes, the torch that gives us the strength, like Jacob, to wrestle with the demons, and the courage, like Joshua, to boldly go where no mind and no community has gone before.

Now I want to share a secret.

There is a common space that all cultures share — ancient, modern, eastern, western, indigenous. A space that symbolizes the cycles of birth, life and death, of nourishment and growth, and of new beginnings.

This common space is the GARDEN.

Every culture has had a love affair with its gardens.

Paradise, in the original Greek and Hebrew, was a garden.

Jesus said at the end, “I’ll see you in the garden.”

And now the latest neuroscience says that your brain has a built-in pruning system, and works like a garden.

And with expanded reality, we have a chance, an unprecedented chance, to build a Second Garden, a garden of agape and metamorphosis.

“Be metamorphed … by the renewing of your mind,” said Paul. And right now, at our fingertips, we have tools of metamorphosis — tools that previous generations could not even imagine.

We have a new power, literally, to:

• mulch … those negative emotions
• weed … those anxious thoughts
• water … the seeds of peace

and as Paul said, harvest the fruit of the spirit together.

Now maybe when you hear a talk like this, you’re skeptical, and find it hard to believe that expanded reality will do any good. And that well, maybe we were banished from the First Garden for good reason.

I hear you. But without the ashes, without compost, there would be no roses, and no beauty.

Works of art, works of poetry and imagination, and the tradition, the rock upon which we stand, promise that a new and better reality — a transfigured reality — is right before us.

Do you remember when Maya Angelou said, at the presidential inauguration,

Very simply
With hope —
Good morning.

Or when Amanda Gorman reminded us that

there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
and only if we’re brave enough to be it

These poems didn’t fix the world. But they moved many of us a step close to fixing ourselves. And in our darkest hours, they still give us hope.

Poetry … is another word for hope.

The prophets were poets. And expanded reality is a new medium of poetry. It’s a new medium for what Marilynne Robinson calls Imaginative Love.

Just a generation ago, we couldn’t imagine the internet. And now we can’t imagine living without it. Likewise, in just a few years, you won’t be able to imagine ever having lived without expanded reality.

We are about to do in expanded reality the very things we have never yet done in real reality. Whatever in the past we could only imagine, whatever was hidden, will be revealed.

Aurobindo said that all of life is a play of hidden forces and for the first time we are about to see these forces.

And that’s why vision is so precious.

Never, ever, ever underestimate the power of vision.

Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is lovely, starts as a vision. And where there is no vision, the people perish.

If the artificial intelligence is so powerful that right now, with the mere utterance of a few words, it can create anything we can imagine, then how about we say to the AI:

Show us the people we want to be.

Show us the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

Show us the Garden of a Hundred Hopes

And the Garden of a Billion Breakthroughs

And the Garden of Wisdom and Wonder.

And show us the dream of the ages, the Kehila Kedosha of the Hebrews — what today we call Beloved Community.

But don’t just show us. Take us inside. Give us a real, visceral sense of how it feels to live and move and have our being in this new Garden.

We are the first generation, literally, that can enter the atoms of agape … swim in the molecules of emotion … and feel the neurons of love, firing in a grand chorus of hope.

We all know what an amazing ride Silicon Valley has taken us on in the past generation.

And yet: something is missing.

Something long and wide and deep and high is missing.

It’s the loving touch … the love of the lonely, the love of the stranger. The love that puts peace above politics, and that says, “I may not vote with you, but I’ll break bread with you.”

This morning we read in Hebrews, “Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing you have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

You are all angels to me …

Two magic words come to mind whenever I think of Memorial — ubuntu: I become me through you. And namaste: I see the divinity within you.

I’ve watched people, right here, time and time and time again, even though their own hearts were broken, dig down deep, and help unbreak someone else’s.

As Paul said:

We may be pressed on every side,
but we’re not crushed.

knocked down, but never ever knocked out.

in the eyes of the world having nothing, but inside, having everything.

We have a chance, right here, right now — to bring the heart of Memorial and the genius of Silicon Valley together — to create not just a metaverse, but an (inner)Verse.

And friends, this time we can’t afford to sit on the sidelines.

This is our moment to rise, to expand the horizons of consciousness, and to birth a new garden for the world.

So that what started here, and here, is now there, and everywhere.

Namaste.