I was reading a thread about how writers and college writing instructors can detect text that comes from LLMs -- Large Language Models, i.e. AI. So for an experiment I have ChatGPT the following prompt:
Write a New Year's Day blogpost in the style of the perverse lutheran.blogspot.com. Dismiss the idea of New Year resolutions and instead write about reliance on God's will. Use imagery from anti-Trump folks and the gospel of Matthew.
Here's what it came up with. What do you think? (I'll tell you what I think at the end.)
January 1 arrives like a reset button everyone insists on pressing too hard. Gym memberships bloom, planners open with a crackle of ambition, and the secular liturgy of “new year, new you” is chanted as if enough willpower might finally save us. It’s all very earnest. It’s also mostly bunk.
The trouble with New Year’s resolutions isn’t that they aim too low. It’s that they aim in the wrong direction. They assume the universe is waiting for us to get organized, that history will finally straighten itself out if we stop eating bread or start waking up at 5:30 a.m. They baptize self-improvement and call it hope.
Meanwhile, outside the sanctuary of self-help, the streets are still full. Cardboard signs sag in the cold. Pink hats are stuffed back into closets but not forgotten. The chants echo anyway—against cruelty, against lies, against the cheap salvation of strongmen and red hats promising glory. Anti-Trump folks know something the resolution-makers forget: the world is not fixed by better habits alone. Something deeper is wrong, and something deeper is required.
Matthew’s Gospel does not begin with a to-do list. It begins with a genealogy—messy, compromised, full of people who did not keep their resolutions and were never asked to. It moves quickly to a baby born under empire, to refugees fleeing violence, to a voice crying in the wilderness, “Repent.” Not: optimize. Not: resolve. Repent. Turn. Be re-oriented.
Jesus in Matthew does not say, “Blessed are those who finally get their act together.” He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” the mourners, the meek, the ones who know they are not in control. He tells us not to worry about tomorrow, not because tomorrow will be fine, but because worrying is a lousy god. “Your heavenly Father knows what you need.” That is not advice for productivity; it is a confession of dependence.
New Year’s resolutions are a small, private Tower of Babel—our annual attempt to climb our way into a better future by stacking days and habits just right. And like Babel, they assume God is impressed by height. Matthew’s Gospel suggests God is impressed by mercy. By bread broken and shared. By enemies loved. By lilies that do not hustle.
So on this New Year’s Day, skip the resolutions. They will forgive you; they always do. Instead, stand still long enough to hear the quieter word: “Follow me.” Not after you improve. Not once you’ve figured it out. Follow—into uncertainty, into protest and prayer, into a world still aching under bad rulers and worse idols.
The year will unfold whether we resolve or not. Empires will strut. Crowds will gather. Signs will be lifted. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Christ will be where Matthew always finds him: not crowning our plans, but interrupting them. Not endorsing our willpower, but undoing it with grace.
That, inconveniently and perversely enough, is good news.
What I think:
It doesn't sound like me or my writing at The Perverse Lutheran. It lacks the wandering, wondering quality of me starting out and not knowing where I'm going to end up. It's a little too tight.
Certainly pulls in biblical imagery and mixes it up with anti-Trump political images. Maybe too glibly. I do like the idea of New Year's resolutions being "a small, private Tower of Babel." I wonder if ChatGPT stole that from another blog or sermon published online. Actually I think a lot of what I thought at first was pretty good is a regurgitated mix from human writers. Might even be traceable through search engines.
But -- I've heard many less coherent sermons.
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