The Surprising Connection between Time Travel and The Ascension

As I prepared to preach on the Ascension, I recently found myself contemplating time travel. As one does.

There’s a fascinating connection between time travel and theology. Somewhere beneath all of our stories about time travel is a deeply human longing to believe that love might somehow transcend time itself.

That longing shows up in everything from Back to the Future to Interstellar, where Christopher Nolan imagines time not simply as chronology, but as something fragile and permeable, something through which love still reaches. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Matthew McConaughey’s character falls into a black hole and discovers he can communicate across time by knocking books from a shelf in his daughter’s bedroom decades earlier. It is a strange scene, but also an oddly moving one. A father breaks through time to make love known.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA3Txp94pjs

Which, in its own strange way, is not entirely unlike John’s Gospel, where lectionary-following churches spend ample time each year after Easter.

John’s Gospel often feels less like reading a story and more like being swept up into a prayer already in progress. The sentences loop and spiral around themselves. Jesus speaks in these long bewildering passages filled with “I” and “you” and “mine” and “yours” until the whole thing begins to feel less like linear speech and more like language trying to stretch itself toward mystery.

In John 17, we find Jesus at the Last Supper offering what is often described as his “high priestly prayer.” He prays first for himself, then for the disciples seated around the table, and then, remarkably, for those who will come after them. For future disciples. For generations not yet born. For people somehow gathered into the life of God across centuries and cultures and history itself.

Somehow, Christ’s prayer reaches across time itself.

John’s Gospel insists upon one of Christianity’s most audacious claims: that eternity has entered ordinary human life. “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John writes at the beginning of the Gospel, collapsing the distance between God and ordinary human life. God enters not abstract spirituality, but hunger and friendship and grief and betrayal and dinner tables and human vulnerability as it actually exists.

Which means Christianity is not fundamentally about escaping ordinary life in order to discover God somewhere else. It is about learning to recognize that God has already entered ordinary life fully.

That becomes especially important in a culture like ours, where so much of modern existence conditions us to believe that suffering, limitation, and uncertainty are interruptions to life rather than part of being human. We quietly absorb the assumption that with enough discipline, enough productivity, enough optimization, enough control over our habits and choices, we ought to be able to engineer lives relatively insulated from disappointment or grief or exhaustion. Which means that when suffering does arrive, as it inevitably does, we experience not only pain itself, but also the subtle suspicion that something must have gone terribly wrong.

The honesty of 1 Peter feels important here. “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you,” the author writes, “as though something strange were happening to you.” Christianity does not romanticize suffering, but neither does it treat suffering as evidence of divine absence. In Christ, God has already entered fully into the vulnerability and fragility of human life, into sorrow and abandonment and physical suffering and death itself.

God does not observe human existence safely from a distance. God knows human life from the inside.

Which changes what trust means.

Christian trust is not naïve optimism or confidence that faithful people somehow avoid heartbreak. It is the conviction that even in the middle of ordinary human struggle, we are not abandoned. Jürgen Moltmann once wrote that “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with God,” and I suspect that line captures something essential about Christian hope. Resurrection is not denial. It is trust that suffering and despair do not ultimately have the final word.

This same collision between eternity and ordinary life appears again in the story of the Ascension in Acts. It is striking how little attention Acts gives to the mechanics of the event itself. Jesus is lifted up. A cloud takes him from their sight. The whole thing occupies barely a sentence. No explanation of heavenly geography. No detailed explanation at all. The real focus of the story turns out not to be Jesus ascending, but the disciples standing there staring upward while two figures ask them, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

The question matters because the meaning of the Ascension is not fundamentally upward, but outward.

The Ascension is not permission to disengage from the world while waiting for rescue from somewhere beyond it. As Douglas John Hall often argued, Christian faith is not escape from the world, but deeper engagement with the world in hope. Trusting that God has already entered ordinary human existence frees us to recognize holiness not beyond life, but within it: in classrooms and conference rooms, in hospital visits and difficult conversations, in caregiving and parenting and the quiet, mostly unnoticed work of loving neighbors well.

Which may also be why so much of genuine discipleship appears unimpressive by the standards of modern culture.

Most of the people who shaped my own faith were not celebrities or visionaries or extraordinary spiritual heroes. They were ordinary people who showed up consistently. Sunday school teachers. Parents. Mentors. Coaches. People who quietly carried the life of faith forward through patience, kindness, attention, and care.

And perhaps one of the defining spiritual anxieties of our age is the fear that ordinary lives are not meaningful enough. We fear our lives are too small, too unnoticed, too unremarkable to matter. We want to be astronauts traveling galaxies when most of life actually unfolds in ordinary acts of fidelity that rarely look impressive in the moment.

Which brings me back to Interstellar.

The movie’s true hero is arguably not Cooper, the astronaut traveling across space and time, but his daughter Murph, who remains on Earth doing the patient, difficult, unspectacular work set before her. She studies. She perseveres. She commits herself to solving a problem larger than herself without the glamour of cosmic adventure attached to it.

And maybe that is one of Christianity’s oldest and strangest claims: that eternity has already entered ordinary human life, which means God is not waiting for us somewhere beyond the world, beyond our work, beyond our grief, beyond parenting and caregiving and difficult conversations and the quiet responsibilities that fill ordinary days.

Christ is already here.

And the glory of God appears in our ordinary lives.

Hamilton for Lent: Why Lin-Manuel Miranda's Soundtrack Resonates on Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday has a way of clearing the room.

The sanctuary is dimmer. The music is quieter. The words are heavier: “Remember that you are dust.” We come forward not for inspiration, but for honesty. Not for triumph, but for truth.

That’s one reason I find myself returning to Hamilton at the beginning of Lent.

If you’ve never listened to the musical, here’s the short version: it’s the story of a brilliant, ambitious man who refuses to “throw away his shot.” He is driven, talented, relentless. And for much of the show, that drive feels heroic. We admire it. We recognize it. In a city like Madison, the city I call home—full of energy, ideas, advocacy, and achievement—that kind of ambition feels familiar.

But as the story unfolds, the repetition of that phrase—“not throwing away my shot”—begins to change. What once sounded like courage slowly reveals itself as compulsion. What once felt like purpose begins to cost him relationships, presence, even peace.

That’s a very Ash Wednesday turn.

Lent is not a season for building on our strengths. It is a season for letting the story go far enough to tell the truth about us. The truth that our gifts are real, but so are our limits. The truth that our striving can serve good purposes, and also conceal vanity, ego, or excess. The truth that we are dust, and yet deeply loved.

Late in the musical, after devastating loss, the soundtrack quiets. The bravado fades. The characters walk through grief. And in one understated line, we hear something new: “I take the children to church on Sunday… and I pray. That never used to happen before.”

It’s not flashy. It’s not triumphant. It’s simply a turning.

Ash Wednesday is not about dramatic spiritual breakthroughs. It’s about that quieter turning. It’s about sitting in the stillness long enough to notice what has been driving us—and to let God name us something deeper than our achievements.

For ELCA Lutherans especially, Lent is not a self-improvement project. It is a journey with Christ toward the cross, trusting that the truth told there is not the end of the story.

Listening to Hamilton during these forty days can be a reminder of how ambition, failure, grief, and grace intertwine—and how even in the quiet uptown moments of our lives, God is still at work.

Dust, yes. But dust held in mercy. Ashes, yes. But ashes mixed with stardust. Thanks be to God.

AI and Accomplishment: Will ChatGPT Take My Job (Satisfaction)?

Why bother with writing?

It's not a particularly lucrative activity, nor does it magnify my "influence." If I wanted steady income or cultural clout I would make reaction videos on TikTok. I don't write because my work makes the world a better place or because society so desperately needs my voice. If I wanted either I would look towards organizations or movements with wider followings than I have (though I am grateful for each and every one of the 13 followers I amassed while still on Twitter).

Truthfully, I write for selfish reasons. I write because doing so gives me a clear sense of satisfaction. Completing a thoughtful paragraph or a clever phrase provides a sense of "job well done" that is difficult to attain elsewhere. Typical of an Enneagram "3," I have a bias for achievement. Writing, blogging, occasionally publishing, are activities that feed my bias and nourish my ego. Putting pen to paper or words to the screen helps me to feel an objective sense of impact and rectitude, scarce sentiments in a culture of speed, and subjectivity. Even the writing projects that ostensibly achieve nothing --- few views, zero re-tweets, certainly no monetization --- have a way of convincing my egotistical self that my work is satisfactory.

Over the last two years, I've added more technology into the creative process. I've increasingly started to work and to write alongside AI. I started slowly at first, apps like Grammarly and ChatGPT serving as high-tech spell-checkers. And then I learned what else LLMs could provide: post titles and content outlines, suggestions for the next paragraph and prompts for the next post, tables of contents, images, translations, and recommendations for further reading. I learned that AI could subtly adjust the tone of voice of an entire essay, reformat a course for a different set of learners, and polish scraps of notation in a message fit for a chief executive.

I've certainly become more efficient after hiring AI as my editor and co-creator. Projects that once took me days are now requiring hours. Tasks that were once tedious are now easy to complete. While I've stopped short of generating entire works from LLMs, I wonder how coherent my words would be if I were to start a project without the support and love of my preferred large language models. I should note that as I type these words, Wix, my site hosting platform, is nudging me to use its own AI to "generate a full-length blog post with a title and images." Do I dare click the magic button and end today's writing session?

Even with this artificially-generated efficiency, I've observed a change in how I feel—in writing, content creation, project development, even in emailing people with important job titles. Something seems off. And I think I know what's missing.

Thanks to AI, thee smug, self-centered satisfaction I used to feel in my writing isn't as strong as it used to be. The sense of accomplishment from a witty phrase or a creative expression isn't as evident since I started using OpenAI.

Our cultural dialogue around AI emphasizes efficiency gains and existential threats, environmental impact and essential regulation. It's a dialogue that is ever-sensitive to career displacement. But lost in this conversation is the topic of AI and achievement. AI might very well take my job. Must it also take my sense of job satisfaction?

We're all on a learning curve with artificial intelligence, but that curve is more complex than we imagine. It's not that we must learn to master ChatGPT or to work alongside these magical technologies. It's that we must also learn to do so in a way that preserves what makes the creative process worthwhile. The real learning curve for AI is to discover how to use these resources in a way that preserves that spark of accomplishment, that glimmer of a job well done, that visceral feeling that comes when I have envisioned, written, or brought to life something both original and useful.

I'm not particularly worried that AI is going to take jobs - mine or yours. But I'm becoming increasingly concerned that AI is going to remove some of the agency and autonomy that fuels so many of us in our creative pursuits.

Will AI make us more productive? Most certainly. Will it diminish the delight we take in our efforts? Perhaps. Will it make the creative process a slog? It remains to be seen. What's at stake is more important than a temporary occupation. What's at stake is our intangible yet foundational sense of purpose and meaning. As AI development accelerates, the very human challenge in front of us is to retain the joy of creativity as AI makes us increasingly productive.