In getting ready for my Palm Sunday sermon, I came across a commentary where the commentator talked about “Screenagers.” Having never heard the term, I looked it up on Google and Wikipedia. It seems to be a movie that was produced in 2016 talking about growing up in a tech saturated world and the need for a balance between screen time and non-screen time.
The commentator used it in terms of Screenagers in all generations being fully prepared for Easter by probing the depths of our baptismal dying with Christ. We live in a sound byte culture – and sometimes that is good, but sometimes what is said is taken out of context. Screenagers who can’t balance time with screens and time without may have difficulty with the demands of Holy Week. It is a journey to Jerusalem with Jesus, and sound bytes won’t do it justice. We need the full experience of being with Jesus as his last meal with his disciples, we need to remember the proper place of a leader as a servant, and we need to engage fully the reality that is the cross. Not only an instrument of torture and a thing of public spectacle – but the very throne on which Jesus rules. Jesus, the suffering lover of the entire world can’t be appreciated without fully engaging these realities.
Do we have the ability to do that, or do we just need bytes of data for our lives of faith?
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