Who Gets Left Behind in the AI Age? A Christian Response to Growing Inequality
Updated: Sep 22
Sermon from Sunday, May 3, 2026 · Luke 14:13-14 · Faith in the Age of AI, week 4
The church usually preaches about things after they are baked. This series has been an attempt to preach while the cake is still in the oven, and every week it challenges me.
One of our members told me that every time he drives 101 there is a billboard for an AI company. He is right. AI for sales, AI for legal, AI for healthcare, AI for your call center, AI for your kids, AI for your pets. Twenty-some miles from San Francisco to San Jose would convince you that AI has won.
But if I drove twenty miles through Ohio, or Indiana, or Georgia, would I see the same signs? Where you sit shapes your view, and we sit in the one strip of the world where AI is not coming. It is here. So we have started to assume everyone else sits where we sit, and that the only question left is how to adapt.
When I prepared this sermon I went looking for real numbers, because that is what you do in a room like this. What I found stopped me.
Most of the country is not here
The Federal Reserve reported in April 2026, drawing on census data, that only 18 percent of U.S. firms had adopted AI by the end of 2025. Four out of five businesses are not using what we live and breathe. A national workforce survey found that 41 percent of workers use generative AI for work, about half the country has never typed a single prompt, and only 38 percent of employees use it daily.
That is not what the pitch decks say. Three gaps are opening. An institutional gap: the businesses that will be shaped by these tools are mostly not in the room deciding what they are for. An individual gap: half the country has not used AI, not because they cannot, but because the door has not been opened for them. And a widening gap: researchers find education is the strongest predictor of who uses AI, so the inequalities already in our schools are multiplying into new inequalities of access. This bubble is moving forward. The Midwest, the Rust Belt, the South, and working America mostly are not.
And the kingdom of Jesus has always stood with the ones the world leaves behind.
Who pays the hidden costs
Workers in Nairobi, Manila, and São Paulo are paid pennies to look at the worst images on the internet all day so the models stay polite for us. Reporting this year described the depression it has caused in those communities.
The pulse oximeter on your finger reads Black and brown skin less accurately, and that data feeds medical databases. Facial recognition finds our faces well when a system wants to accuse us, and poorly when we need it to work for us. The electricity and water these systems consume is unprecedented. And 2.5 billion people, a third of the people alive, still do not have internet. Drive Route 5 toward Bakersfield and you pass communities less than a hundred miles from this church that cannot participate in the wealth being created here. The people who clean, teach, keep us safe, and guard the door at Whole Foods are being pushed further out of the new economy.
Every one of those costs is paid by someone whose name does not appear in the optimization. Every one lands on a person God knows by name. They are not externalities or collateral damage in somebody’s scaling story. They are named guests at the kingdom banquet.
AI is not built on top of nothing. It is built on top of people. The kingdom of God is built around them. That is the tension for believers.
A dinner on the Sabbath
Luke 14 opens at a Sabbath dinner at the house of a Pharisee, and the text says they were watching Jesus carefully. This was not friendship. It was a job interview on God’s day of rest.
In that world a dinner was a working machine. You did not invite people because they were hungry. You invited them because the dinner did something: built status, arranged obligations, sorted who was on the way up. Cicero wrote that generosity should be in proportion to the recipient’s capacity to repay you in cash, honor, or alliance. That is a coffee shop on University Avenue with seven meetings on the calendar. We have been to those dinners. We have hosted them.
Jesus watched who jockeyed for the best seats. Then he spoke, and not to the room. Privately, to the host, eye to eye: “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”
Notice what he did not say. He did not say “the marginalized.” He did not say “be inclusive.” He gave the host four names, and every one of them is a verdict. Leviticus 21 barred people with exactly those conditions from approaching the altar. Jesus named the people the religious system had named out.
And notice how he did it. He did not flip the table this time. He pulled the host aside. Some of you sit at tables where people are being edited out and never say a thing. Jesus shows you a way to say it.
Because they cannot repay you
The reason Jesus gives is the reason the world’s economy treats as a disqualification. The reason is the thing the algorithm cannot count.
He did not say run a service project for them, or fund a separate program, or send a check and stay home. He said invite them in. Same table, same bread, same cup, same dignity as your friends and your rich neighbors. The kingdom is not interested in the demographic. It is interested in the face, the name, the person made in the image of God.
Here is what the host did not know yet. Three years later he would be a guest at another table, one he could not afford, set by a man with nails in his hands. On the night Jesus was betrayed, the bread was broken without anyone purchasing it and the cup was poured without anyone bargaining for it. Pharisees, fishermen, sinners, you, me: all unrepayable.
You and I are the people in verse 13. That is the gospel. The host of the kingdom’s banquet did not screen the guest list. Imagine if he had read your résumé before he accepted you. We host because we have been hosted. We were the unrepayable first. That is the only reason Luke 14 is good news instead of an impossible assignment.
This is who we have always been. In 1796 a group of Black Christians walked out of John Street Methodist Church in New York because the communion rail was segregated. The bread was being broken by hands that had decided which bodies counted. That walkout became the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. When Jesus says invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, this house should hear its own history.
This week: three practices
Silicon Valley does not respond to vague, so here are three. Not seven. We are not optimizing this.
One open seat. In the next month, host a meal or schedule one hour with someone who cannot pay you anything. They cannot fund you, promote you, or connect you. Make the meal. Tell no one. Do not post about it. Let the practice retrain your heart.
One hour a week. Give it to someone the algorithm cannot count. Tutor a child in an under-resourced district. Sit with a hospice patient. Visit the prison. Mentor a young person who is not on the fast track. Not measured, not on LinkedIn. Time the world cannot get back.
One financial decision a month. Run it through a different test. Not what is the return, but what would make sense only if the resurrection of the just is real. A check written, a scholarship given, a debt forgiven, a bill paid that you will never tell anyone you paid.
We live in a world that is dehumanizing people faster than ever. The church cannot join that process. It has to be the brake against it.
See you Sunday.
Pastor Kaloma Smith
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