Bricks, Babel & Your Smartphone
Sunday, January 4, 2026
Scriptures: Genesis 11
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Summary: In the first sermon of our new series, How to Be (More) Creative, Jeremy shows how creativity isn’t a niche skill for artists but a core part of being human, since we’re made in the image of a creative God. He explores how technology, ancient and modern, can amplify creativity but also distort it. He examines some of our modern technology and how it shapes our attention, relationships, and even parenting. He offers us three practical practices for a creative, faithful life: stay intentionally curious, stay critically aware of power and incentives, and stay spiritually close to God through daily dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
Smartphones:
Jeremy starts by examining contemporary technology, particularly smartphones, acknowledging both their brilliance and their capacity to fragment attention, weaken presence, and subtly reshape parenting and relationships. He calls us to our responsibility to technology, that it should be used creatively and intentionally, rather than allowed to quietly form our habits and desires.Bricks and Babel:
Using Genesis 11 as an example, Jeremy reads the Babel story as an ancient reflection on technology, with the invention of brickwork and bricklaying as a means for powerful leaders of the day to consolidate their power over the powerless. He argues that this symbolizes how misweilded innovation can lead to uniformity, centralized power, and self-aggrandizement.Technology and Consequences:
This ancient pattern can be mapped onto our modern digital technology, urging us to recognize how tools meant to help can quietly shape and diminish human flourishing. He warns us that unchecked efficiency can hollow out our creativity and turn us into means rather than neighbours that creatively care for one another.Frivolous Creativity:
Jeremy offers three practical tips for faithful creativity: cultivating curiosity in relationships, developing a critical posture toward power, and remaining close to God through daily dependence. Without withdrawing from the world, we can benefit from intentional, humble engagement that keeps love, attention, and trust rightly ordered. -
Community is shaped by the conversations we share. These questions and reflections are a tool to help you meaningfully engage with the themes of this week's teaching.
Connect: Jeremy opens by reframing the idea of creativity being narrowly defined as purely artistic talent. Instead, he expands the definition of the word to encompass our human endeavours and relationships—made in the image of a creative God, and creatively engaging with one another.
Q: Taking this new definition to heart, name a time when you’ve felt most fully yourself in ways that weren’t traditionally labelled “creative”?
Share: Share how technology has been both helpful and a hinderance in your life, especially regarding your relationships.
Q: Can you name a moment when technology helped you feel more connected, and another when it quietly pulled you away from presence or relationship?
Reflect: Reflect on Jeremy’s exploration of the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11. How does his interpretation of that story through the lens of powerful people using technological innovation toward malicious ends impact the way you think about your relationship to our modern advances.
Q: Where do you find modern technology quietly influencing your attention, relationships, or sense of self more than you intend?Engage: Engage with the three practices that Jeremy offered. Consider his words,
“I want to talk about being curious, and critical, and close.
First, let’s talk about being curious. We have been trained to only focus on what grabs our attention immediately. The problem is, the most important relationships, the people who will shape you, even the Jesus who might change your life, will not immediately grab your attention. The most fascinating things about us are buried under a mountain of conversations, born of intentional curiosity, because efficiency is not the goal in relationship.
Second, let’s talk about being critical. I’m not anti-technology, but I am fond of a hermeneutic of suspicion. When something is free, what’s actually being sold? If we don’t learn to ask that question, we will find ourselves no longer directing our own story.
And finally, let’s talk about closeness. Technology can make us feel far more self-sufficient than we really are. One of the ways we regain our creativity is by drawing close to the source of all that is good, by remembering our dependence, by praying for daily bread. Because if we forget how close we are to our need for grace, we will end up using our bricks in ways that eventually use us.”
Which of the three practices—curiosity, critical awareness, or closeness—feels most urgent or neglected in your life right now?Takeaway: What is your takeaway from the message or today’s conversation?
Prayer from the sermon:
God of new beginnings
who is always ahead,
inviting us forward,
encouraging us to begin and begin again.
Would you be present in the start of this new year
as we imagine ourselves in new moments and situations,
as we learn to love the best about what you have created in us,
as we survey a new year laid out before us
full of possibilities and dangers and triumphs and failures
might we become captured by what you see in us
goodness, and kindness, and strength, and resolveAnd then would you fill our lungs with the fresh breathe of spirit allows us
to see with new eyes the possibilities ahead.
Bring us in joy as real as grace
to celebrate your holy presence with us.
In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Amen. -
CALL TO WORSHIP Psalm 108
MUSIC Curated by Kevin Borst
John Mark McMillian - Ancient Love
Commons Worship - Be Thou My Vision
Brooke Ligertwood - King of Kings
Royal Anthems - Turn Your Eyes
EUCHARIST INVITATION
Written by Bobbi Salkeld
SERIES BUMPER
How To Be More Creative
