Thinking Faithfully About AI: Friction - Romans 5 Sermon
Scripture: Romans 5:1–8
Series: Thinking Faithfully About AI
Preacher: Russell Smith
Date: September 20, 2026
Church: Madeira-Silverwood Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, Ohio
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We are continuing through this series that I have titled Thinking Faithfully About AI. Part of what I am doing in this series is taking some of the Silicon Valley buzzwords that are used around artificial intelligence and reinterpreting them through a Christian lens and a Christian understanding. We have talked about ideas like agency and spped, and next week we will talk about context. This week, we are talking about friction.
The Dream of a Frictionless Life
If you have not spent much time in the software-design world, you may remember friction mainly from eighth-grade physics. In software design and marketing, however, friction refers to anything that gets in the way of someone using a product smoothly. It began as a sensible design principle: remove unnecessary clicks, eliminate needless drop-down menus, simplify navigation, and make the experience flow.
Somewhere along the way, though, frictionlessness began to become an organizing philosophy for life.
Mark Zuckerberg helped popularize this vision in 2011 when he spoke about “frictionless experiences” on Facebook. The idea was that you could connect Facebook to services such as Yelp, Spotify, or Instagram, and what you were doing would appear automatically in your feed. You would not need to make an intentional decision to point, click, and share. Your friends would see what you were doing, you would see what they were doing, and all of you would enjoy what Zuckerberg called “real-time serendipity.” You would discover things simply because your friends were doing them.
It was an interesting vision: we would all discover things without difficulty. That vision captured Silicon Valley and kept moving forward. Today, some AI advocates talk about frictionless work as though artificial intelligence were a genie in a bottle that could make everything happen for us with a poof.
Anna Wiener offers an important critical voice. She worked in the technology industry and later recounted that experience in her memoir Uncanny Valley. In a 2021 episode of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, she described frictionlessness as the idea that everything should be as fast and easy as possible in order to bring you to the moment in a digital experience that generates revenue.
That observation reminds us that these experiences are not neutral. A large technology company removes friction because it wants to sell us something. As friction disappears, Wiener suggests, we may also surrender some of our decision-making agency. Things are simply served up to us. Search-engine optimization became important because most people click one of the first few links in a Google search. Now we have AI optimization: can your answer be the one that an AI system supplies when somebody asks a question? The result feels instant and seamless, and our tendency is not to question it.
In a frictionless world, we may cede some of our agency and decision-making power to whatever corporation runs the software. Wiener recalled that a software-metrics company where she worked even measured what it called “addiction.” It was a retention graph: the longer a user stayed in an app and the more frequently that user returned, the better. The mindset was simple—remove friction so that the user becomes addicted to the app. Wiener calls frictionlessness one of the defining qualities of our cultural moment.
We can probably already see many of the problems inherent in that vision. To be fair, many voices within Silicon Valley see those problems too. They argue that we should not pursue frictionlessness at all costs and that some friction helps us grow. But for quite some time, a frictionless experience—and eventually a frictionless life—has been held out as the goal.
“Frictionlessness” is even hard to say. But it is worth sitting with the idea, because it reveals how small our hopes can become when convenience is treated as the highest good.
Paul presents a very different vision. Scripture presents a very different vision. So let us pause and listen to what Paul has to say.
The Gift of Peace with God
Paul does not begin with ease or the removal of inconvenience. He begins with the gift of peace with God. There is a chasm of difference between a frictionless life where everything is easy and cozy, and a life that possesses peace with God.
Paul has spent the first four chapters of Romans building to this moment. He has spoken about sin, grace, and forgiveness. In the chapter immediately preceding our passage, he talks about Abraham, who followed God and entered into relationship with God. Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness. Abraham showed us the way of walking in a relationship of faith with the living God: entrusting ourselves to God and taking steps of faith.
Paul then begins our passage: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” We have a right standing in our relationship with God simply through faith, through entrusting ourselves to the living God. This is the work of Christ: to give us not merely a frictionless experience, but deep peace, deep settledness, deep fullness, and deep fulfillment. Through Christ, Paul says, “we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.”
I will confess that, when I was putting this series together a couple of months ago, I considered making an analogy about “spiritual friction.” Perhaps sin was the spiritual friction in our lives, and Jesus simply overcame it. But as I wrestled with the text, I realized that analogy cheapens what Paul is saying.
When Silicon Valley talks about friction, it is talking about inconvenience. It casts us as consumers and removes the barriers that keep us from getting whatever we want. That is not what Paul is talking about. Sin is not an inconvenience that makes it difficult for us to achieve our spiritual goals. Sin is not merely friction that keeps us from becoming all that God wants us to be. Sin is a fundamental brokenness that warps our ability to perceive, discern, and choose. It is a ruptured relationship. We are askew.
The latter part of the passage helped me see the much larger stakes. Paul writes, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” He does not say that we were blocked by a little friction or inconvenienced by a few extra clicks. We were powerless. We were burdened under something. “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
This is something much bigger than friction. This is bondage. This is being bound, chained, and shackled. Paul is playing for much bigger stakes. Our world often thinks too small when it talks about convenience and comfort. Paul is speaking about eternity, meaning, purpose, and relationship with the eternal, living God.
We have something far more significant than frictionless commerce. We have a life of spiritual freedom in Christ. We are freed from the things that shackle our souls and lock us down. Paul causes us to ask whether there is something superior to frictionlessness. There is: freedom—spiritual freedom.
Freedom Is Better Than Frictionlessness
Paul develops this idea in Galatians: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” He is not speaking merely about removing barriers. He is speaking about freedom from things that crush and oppress the soul.
In Galatians, Paul warns Christians not to submit again to the burden of religious law-keeping. He calls it a yoke of slavery. For our era, the burden may look different. We may sell ourselves to the idea that we are merely economic creatures. We may embrace softness and fragility, trained to believe that all our needs must be met immediately because the customer is always right.
The Pixar film WALL-E imagines a future in which machines take care of everything for human beings. Earth has become uninhabitable, and the humans float through space in chairs while machines anticipate every need. The little robot WALL-E helps them rediscover that there is more to life than comfort. Can comfort itself become a burden of slavery? That may be one of the questions of our moment.
Neil Postman anticipated this danger in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the foreword, he contrasts two twentieth-century dystopias: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell feared an externally imposed oppression—books banned, information withheld, truth concealed, and a culture held captive by what it hated. Huxley feared that people would come to love their oppression and adore the technologies that diminished their ability to think. No one would need to ban books because no one would want to read them. Information would become so abundant that people would sink into passivity and egoism. Truth would not be concealed; it would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Culture would not merely become captive. It would become trivial.
Postman’s prescient warning sounds remarkably similar to Wiener’s critique. He suggested that we could be shackled by pleasure, comfort, and ease. That may be the burden of slavery with which we wrestle in the dream of a frictionless society.
The freedom Christ gives is far deeper. It is not a promise that we will avoid every hard thing. It is the freedom to stand in grace, to live in relationship with God, and to become the people God is forming us to be.
Struggle Is a Forge of Virtue
Paul brings us back to struggle as a forge of virtue. We have been given peace with God through Christ. That does not mean we have been given ease through Christ. Paul writes, “We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
That is a fascinating statement. Paul is not talking about the inconvenience of waiting through a few extra clicks. The word he uses for suffering carries the sense of being pressed down, crushed, and oppressed. Yet he says that our struggles shape us. In Christ, difficulty is not simply removed. We discover that we are not alone in it, and Christ empowers us to grow through it.
To hear how striking Paul’s claim is, consider how the ancient world thought about struggle and suffering. One of the easiest portals into that world is The Odyssey, which is having a bit of a moment right now due to the wildly popular Christopher Nolan film. The Odyssey belongs to a larger tradition of heroic epics. In those epics, the hero embraces struggle and receives glory by overcoming it—through his wits, as with Odysseus, or through his might, as with Achilles. Glory lies in meeting the struggle and conquering it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with courageously meeting a struggle. The danger comes when struggle itself becomes an idolatry, a field upon which I must win glory for myself.
The Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson explores this restlessness in “Ulysses.” He imagines Odysseus after he has finally returned home to Ithaca and to Penelope. Odysseus is bored out of his skull. He is not at peace with peace. So, near the end of his life, he leaves the kingdom to Telemachus and sets out with his companions in search of another adventure. The poem concludes with his determination “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” It is a magnificent picture of heroic resolve, but it is also a picture of restless, self-inflicted struggle.
That is the contrast. The heroic struggle is about winning glory for yourself. The Christian struggle is about giving glory to God by submitting to being forged.
I do not know what your struggles are. Some of us struggle with poor health. Some struggle with overwhelming responsibilities, financial strain, or difficult relationships. Some struggle simply to put one foot out of bed in the morning. We do not need to chase after struggle; for many of us, struggle has already arrived.
For those who struggle, the message is that you are not alone. Christ is the man of sorrows. Christ is the one who suffered. Christ is the one who struggled on our behalf, and he is with you in the struggle. Your glory is not found in overcoming by your own strength. Your glory is found in turning to Christ, embracing Christ in the struggle, and receiving his grace and mercy.
All of this is much bigger than friction. When we honestly acknowledge the struggles of life, the small irritations we call friction lose some of their importance. Should we remove needless friction? Should we try to make some things easier? Of course. But we do not make an idol of ease.
The Christian is able to endure struggle because there is peace within through Christ. The Christian endures because she knows she is not alone. And in the midst of struggle, we are empowered to become a blessing.
Freedom to Be a Blessing
Paul writes, “Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance produces character; and character produces hope. Nowhere in that progression does Paul say that suffering produces release and comfort. Our struggles forge us so that God’s love, poured into our hearts, can flow through us.
Paul adds an important word in Galatians: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.” Freedom is better than frictionlessness, but freedom is not the liberty to do whatever we please. It is life in relationship with God, who leads us and guides us in the good life. It is freedom for loving service.
That is what we are being shaped for through struggle. That is what Christ is doing in us. A frictionless society may make us cozy, and cozy can make us numb. But when we receive the struggles that come—not chasing them for our own glory, but meeting them with Christ—we are empowered to love.
There is something more valuable than comfort. We are called to embrace the struggles that come with true spiritual freedom in Christ.
Take some time to sit with the Holy Spirit and consider what Christ may be saying to you through this. Listen for his still, small voice. Where have you surrendered agency for the sake of ease? Where has God been shaping you through difficulty? Who might he be calling you to serve even when service is inconvenient? Ask the Lord to show you one small step of faith you can take in response.
Questions for Reflection
What has become effortless in your life recently, and what did you stop doing when it did? Where might you have ceded some of your agency?
What struggles has God used to shape you into who you are today? Looking back, where has the Lord used a hard season to form perseverance, character, or hope?
Who is God calling you to serve, even when it is inconvenient?
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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