Thinking Faithfully About AI: Context -- Psalm 33 Sermon
Scripture: Psalm 33:10-22
Series: Thinking Faithfully About AI
Preacher: Russell Smith
Date: September 27, 2026
Church: Madeira-Silverwood Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, Ohio
Theme verses: Psalm 33:10-11, 13-22
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Sermon Transcript
We are concluding our series, Thinking Faithfully About AI. Through the course of this series, we have been working through some of the buzzwords we hear from Silicon Valley and from AI practitioners. This week we conclude with the buzzword context. Context is such a big deal in the AI world.
To get our brains around context, let me ask you a question. Have you ever had a situation like this? You are working diligently. You have your head down, focused on a project, and someone well-meaning—perhaps a coworker, perhaps your beloved—comes up and just starts talking. They are picking up a conversation as though you had been in it all along, and you do not have the foggiest idea what they are talking about. So you nod along, because that is what adults do when they have no idea what someone is talking about. Finally, you interrupt and say, “I’m so sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” A look of incredulity crosses their face: “Remember? We talked about this… Two weeks ago…. At Skyline.” And suddenly a synapse fires. “Oh, that. Yes, Skyline.” Everything comes together, and you remember the conversation.
That is context at play. When we are focused on a project, the context of that project is what we have loaded into our minds, and we can only upload so much into our brains at a given time. In the AI world, they talk about this as the context window. We would simply say, "What’s on my mind right now?" Then someone comes along with a completely different context, and that new context has to get into our heads. It does not happen automatically. Switching contexts takes energy and effort.
Context, simply put, is the information that is available to make sense of what is happening right now.
We All Need Context
Once you start to grasp this idea of context, it explains so much miscommunication in our world. I have one set of context in my head, someone else has a completely different set, and we are having two completely different conversations at the same time without even realizing it.
It explains why social media can be so toxic. Someone gives a hot take on a little quote that has been taken out of context, and the arguments ensue. When we hear that kind of hot take, we need to ask, "Are they reading that person’s comments in the context of everything they had to say?"
And it is certainly true of how we read Scripture. What every pastor wants you to do is read the Bible in context. Don’t just cherry-pick a verse. Read it in its social, historical, and cultural context. Read it knowing, "This is Paul, not King David." Sometimes we come upon baffling parts of the Bible and wonder what on earth is going on, but when we understand a little of the historical and social context, it becomes a lot more clear. That context enriches our understanding of Scripture.
Context is important for life. And context is especially important with AI.
Context Unlocks the Power of AI
AI is no different. You hear people talk about AI as though it were a magical genie that knows everything. No. AI needs context. If it doesn’t have context, you get the most bland, vague, generic, boring answers. Have you ever tried that? You go to ChatGPT without giving it any context and say, “Hey, I want some information about this,” and it gives you the broadest, most general, banal answer, and you are left wondering, “What’s the big deal? Why are people so excited about this?”
Giving AI the context that it needs in order to give you exceptionally good answers is a big part of working with AI. They call it context engineering. Andrej Karpathy, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, describes it this way: “Context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step.” Think of the context window as what is in the mind of the AI. Filling it is like saying to the AI, “Remember? We talked about this.... Two weeks ago... At Skyline?”
So we need to be intentional about feeding AI context, because AI, as powerful as it sounds, is not unlike us. It can be baffled when someone comes along and hands it something with no context. The difference is that AI will just smile and nod and make up answers if it does not have the right context.
To get good answers, give AI good context. Tell it who it should be: "I want you to be my comedy coach." Tell it who you are: "I’m a pastor, and this story opens a sermon for a suburban congregation." Tell it what's going on: "The last time I told this joke, it fell flat. The setup went on way too long." Tell it what good looks like: "Gentle, self-deprecating humor, nothing at anyone’s expense." Does this start to sound familiar? I basically asked AI to help with my opening story. I was working with Claude as my comedy coach. I had uploaded my whole draft of the sermon, and then I asked it to coach me on the opener. It gave me some things to tweak, and then it told me to tell the congregation, from my comedy coach, that it only worked because of context. If it had not known who I was, what my goals were, and something about our congregation, it probably would have said, “Just tell them an amusing anecdote.”
So context helps, even with comedy. But comedy is not the real point. Context unlocks the power of AI. Without context, these are just large language learning models. Give them the right context, and that is where they become extraordinarily powerful.
Here is an example, from the Today show back in 2023. The Today show interviewed the mother of a little boy named Alex. Starting around age four, during COVID, Alex began suffering all kinds of symptoms, but they were not COVID symptoms. He had chronic pain. He was grinding his teeth. He had stopped growing. He was dragging his left foot. He had severe headaches. His mom, Courtney, did the specialist run-around: from specialist to specialist, trying this, trying that, trying the other thing.
Now, this is no shade on doctors. Doctors are doing the best they can, and each of them brings immense context from a particular specialty. But the answer kept eluding them. Courtney had a different kind of context: the context of a mother’s love. She knew her child. She observed her child. She had kept the records from all those visits, from seventeen different specialists. In her frustration, she took all of it: all the tests and everything she knew about her son, and loaded it into ChatGPT: this is who I am, this is what we have been doing, here is everything. And ChatGPT came back and asked whether anyone had suggested tethered cord syndrome, a hidden form of spina bifida. No one had.
And this is important: she did not just trust ChatGPT. She took it to a pediatric neurosurgeon, who looked everything over and confirmed the diagnosis. Note that. The diagnosis was confirmed by a human expert. You don’t just trust AI. You always get human verification from someone who can examine the child and follow the clues. Courtney said in that interview, "You have to be your kid’s advocate." The machine supplied the pattern matching. The mother, in her love, assembled all the context. And Alex received a diagnosis that allowed his very rare condition to be treated.
That is the power of AI. It can switch from one context to another at our instruction. We point it like a guided missile, and it can find patterns, unlock things, and make new things possible. That is immense power.
The Battle in AI Is a Battle for Context
And because it is immense power, the AI frontier labs are investing billions of dollars, not only in building the language models, but in harvesting context. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, has said, "The battle in AI is shaping up to be a battle for context." What does he mean by that?
You may have seen the news this week. I heard the story on a podcast I listen to, The AI Daily Brief with Nathaniel Whittemore. I rather enjoy his voice, and I enjoy his take on things. This week Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, released a new AI agent called Muse. Perhaps you have seen the ads; they are advertising it heavily. The idea of Muse is that it simply knows you, because Meta has been collecting your information. If you have been on Facebook for fifteen years, Meta has everything you have posted in those fifteen years, every connection, every app you have connected to Facebook. That is your context. And so the idea is that Muse will be able to do all kinds of things for you. Book me some flights. Renew my prescription. Just go out and do it, because it has all this context about you and knows all about you.
Then, this week, Amazon blocked Meta’s agent from doing anything on the Amazon family of sites. Why would they do that? Because if you have been shopping with Amazon for ten or fifteen years, they know all kinds of things about you. They know what books you buy, what you browse, what you watch on Amazon Prime. They have been harvesting your context too, and they want you doing your AI tasks with their AI agent.
The power of our day is not necessarily the power of military might. It is the power of context, the power of your information. And all these organizations are spending billions of dollars to harvest your context because they want to sell you things. Let’s be charitable: that is not a bad thing in itself. They want you to be happy with what you buy so that you keep buying from them. But we need to understand what is going on behind the scenes. The battle in AI is the battle for context, and particularly for your context.
No Company Is Saved by the Size of Its Context
So if context unlocks the power of AI, and there is money to be made and power to be had in the access to and control of context and content, that brings us to Psalm 33, and why I chose this psalm today. It would be very tempting to say that content and context are where all the power in the cosmos lies. But control of content and control of context is not the ultimate force in the cosmos. Yes, AI can do wonderful things, like helping Courtney find a diagnosis for her son. It can do nifty things, like booking a flight simply because you spoke to your AI agent. But we must remember that even with all the billions of dollars being spent, it is not the ultimate force in the cosmos.
Jumping to the middle of our passage: "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; despite all its great strength it cannot save." In the context of the ancient world, all the great power lay with kings, with their armies and their might. If they could amass enough force, they could extend their empire and project their will. That is how the ancient world worked: might came first, and the economy followed as the king built things. In our era, it is increasingly economics and technology. Large multinational corporations extend their power through AI.
So let me offer an interpretive application of this verse. It is a bit of a creative application, but I think it holds. No corporation is saved by the size of its context. No AI company escapes by its vast number of data centers. No corporation escapes by the might of its large language model. A massive AI corporation is a vain hope for deliverance. We could go on applying it to every indicator and accrual of economic power. Ultimately, they are not the ultimate force in the cosmos, and we need to keep reminding ourselves of these truths.
AI can be very useful, but it is not going to save us. We are not going to usher in some new utopia because of AI. It can be very helpful, but it will not be the ultimate source of answers. Yes, Courtney received help, but AI is a tool, an instrument that helps. It can be very powerful, and it can be directed toward good ends or bad ends. In their place, the great and the powerful can do mighty things; directed toward bad ends, they do horrible things. But all the pretenders to power and might are ultimately humbled before the eternal power and might of the Lord.
The Plans of the Lord Stand Firm Forever
The reality, as I understand it, is that the cosmos is not run by the powerful actors of the world. When we pull the camera lens back, we see that God’s purposes guide the cosmos. Not Meta’s purposes, not Amazon's purposes, not OpenAI's purposes, not Anthropic's purposes: God’s purposes guide everything in all of creation.
Go back to the beginning of our passage: "The LORD foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples." We might say the Lord foils the plans of the large corporations. Not always, of course, but the point is that they do not have the last word. "But the plans of the LORD stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations." We lay our plans and do our little things, but God’s plans and purposes stretch across time and space, across millennia and eons. This is a purposefulness that spans the generations, as God, like a master planner, has been working his purposes out. It is incredibly humbling. I have a hard time planning what I’m doing next week. God has been planning the cosmos for eternity.
All our agendas, our dreams and goals, our aspirations and grandiose adventures, are but small, tiny movements in the vast symphony God has composed. We are but a small moment in a magnificent, greater work of art, and we don’t always see how our small moment fits into the whole. That takes an act of faith, an act of trust.
For me, the great literary picture of this truth comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Everybody is familiar with The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is its backstory, the myth of how Middle-earth came to be, which Tolkien worked on for pretty much his whole lifetime. It was not published during his lifetime; his son Christopher edited it and published it after his death. If The Lord of the Rings is the New Testament of his world, The Silmarillion is the Old Testament. And Tolkien’s world-building was shaped deeply by his Catholic faith. He was a devout Catholic, very Trinitarian, and he loved the Lord.
So The Silmarillion tells a creation story that is not unlike other myths of the ancient world, and yet it feels very Christian. Instead of saying, "Let there be light," the creator God of Middle-earth sings. He sings creation into existence. What a beautiful picture. He sings the archangels into existence as well—divine figures we would call archangels—and they so enjoy the song that they pick it up and sing it, each making it their own and giving it a distinctive flavor, just as we creatures bring our own personality to the work God has given us.
Then there is the Satan character, an archangel named Melkor. What an ominous-sounding name. Melkor sings a discordant song, harsh and driving, trying to turn the tune to his own. And the creator God incorporates that discord into a much larger, vaster symphony of praise. Melkor tries again, and again the creator God brings the song back. Melkor tries once more, and the creator God sings a final, triumphant flourish that shuts Melkor down completely, weaving everything together into one beautiful symphony. And then there is silence, and that becomes creation.
So the picture is this. We all have agency. The archangels, and indeed all creatures, pick up their piece of the great composition and make it their own. Yet somehow God has his eye on everything and weaves it together into a majestic symphony of praise. His purposes will not be thwarted. His purposes will not be deterred.
God Holds All the Context
And that, I suggest, is what is in play in this psalm. God holds all the context of the cosmos in his mind. He knows every strand of the song, even the discordant ones, even the context of those who are trying to thwart his will. "From heaven the LORD looks down and sees all mankind; from his dwelling place he watches all who live on earth—he who forms the hearts of all, who considers everything they do." God holds it all in his mind. That is extraordinary. It is mind-boggling to me.
It is also mildly terrifying, isn’t it? AI does not know everything. It only knows what we have loaded into it, what we have given it and told it. AI does not see the secret places of our hearts. Every human being is a vast continent of internal experience: unshared dreams, secret thoughts and ambitions, unexpressed emotions, the subtle interplay of the things that bring us delight that we wouldn’t even know how to express. That is context AI will never have, because we may never have explored it or shared it. But it is all in there. And God sees it all. He sees all the nooks and crannies of our hearts and the recesses of our minds, and he holds it all in his hand. That could be a terrifying thought.
God’s Context Is Defined by Love
But God not only holds all the context in his mind. His context is defined by his love for his people. That is the key thing I want you to grab here. "But the eyes of the LORD are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love, to deliver them from death and keep them alive in famine."
Yes, God holds all our context, and God holds it through the lens of love. Through Christ we are reconciled to God; that is the work of Christ, to secure that relationship of love. Through the Holy Spirit we are drawn to God, into a relationship of reverential respect, and the Spirit pours that love into our hearts. We can trust that the God who knows all our context, the God who holds all the context of the universe, is viewing us through the lens of love.
Think again of Courtney and her son Alex. As a mother who deeply loved her child, she held all of his context in love, to seek his good. If that is true of a human mother, how much more is it true of our heavenly Father, who has seen and known us from before the councils of eternity? He holds us in the palm of his hand. He intends good and love for us.
Do you believe that God has his eye on you? Can you believe that his gaze is a gaze of unfailing love, not a gaze of condemnation? Because of the grace of Christ, his gaze is a gaze of unfailing love. Do you believe that Christ will deliver you from death, and from all that threatens you? Can you believe that the Spirit enlivens you even now? This is the loving context of the living God. He holds all your context in his hand.
We Wait in Hope for the Lord
And so the psalmist moves from these reflections on the might of God, who holds all the context of the cosmos in his hands, to an affirmation of faith: "We wait in hope for the LORD; he is our help and our shield. In him our hearts rejoice, for we trust in his holy name." He moves to declaring, "Yes, I believe. No matter what is going on with all the power brokers of the world, I am in the hands of the Lord."
It is a good affirmation, and here is something else AI cannot do: it cannot say it for us. It can only repeat it back to us. There is something powerful about verbalizing that our context is in the hands of the Lord. So I invite you, if you feel so led, to join your voice with mine:
We wait in hope for the LORD; he is our help and our shield. In him our hearts rejoice, for we trust in his holy name.
This is the kind of thing worth storing up in your mind, in your context. Memory is part of your context; we call it memorizing. Imagine repeating these words again and again until they sink into our hearts and shape our context, so that we know we are shaped and held by the God who loves us immensely. Then, in moments of struggle, in those moments when you feel forgotten, you can come back to it: we wait in hope for the Lord. He is our help and our shield.
The psalm ends with a prayer: "May your unfailing love be with us, LORD, even as we put our hope in you." The psalmist moves from affirmation to prayer, turning to the Lord and inviting him to keep pouring forth his unfailing love. Yes, the Lord has all the context of our lives: the good, the bad, and the ugly. But the Lord also extends his unfailing love to us through Christ, and we invite that unfailing love to wash over us.
That is my prayer for all of us as we wrap up this series. We have talked about fear, and we have talked about all the buzzwords. There are new stories about AI every day—probably because, since I have been looking at AI, the algorithm feeds me more of them. Some of them are terrifying. Some of them say we are about to enter a whole new era. They stir all kinds of things up, and there is incredible societal change and turmoil happening because of AI. But remember: God holds the cosmos in his hands. God holds it all in his mind. God holds you in the palm of his hand. We entrust ourselves to the God who has all the context, the eternal intelligence, the true supreme intelligence. May his unfailing love be with you, even as we put our hope not in AI, but in the Lord.
Invitation to Reflection
Take a few moments to sit and listen to the Lord, to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. Consider what the Lord has been saying to you through this psalm and through the whole of worship, and ask what one thing you might do in response to the vastness of his love.
Questions for Reflection
Where am I looking to AI, or to any of the powers of this world, for the kind of help only God can give?
How does it change things for me to know that God holds all the context of my life, even the secret places of my heart, through the lens of unfailing love?
What words from Psalm 33 do I want to store up in my memory for the moments when I feel forgotten?
This sermon is part of the Digital Discipleship Resources of Madeira-Silverwood Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. We create resources to help people take their next step of faith with Jesus.
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