A Resurrection Can Happen Today
In today’s gospel we hear the story of a grieving widow at her son’s funeral. During the funeral procession, Jesus approached the mother and said to her “Do not weep.” He then resurrected the young man and gave him to his mother. Thousands witnessed this miracle and glorified God. My beloved brothers and sisters, the worst tragedy we can experience in our lives is the loss of a child. It is an unimaginable loss that none of us want to think about. We try our best to keep our children safe from danger, safe from illness, safe from physical death. But do we try hard enough to keep them safe from spiritual death?
Our children are in danger. They are slowly dying right before our eyes and we’re not seeing it. As Orthodox Christians, we baptize our babies, we bring our children to church and Sunday school, and we sign them up for the various church ministries, teaching our children to follow the Lord. And then they start growing up. They stop having time to do the “church stuff.” Their time and focus is spent on schoolwork, sports, and parties. Of course these are all important parts of a person’s life, but they should never take away from time that needs to be focused on God. These activities have become so competitive that we are slowly losing our morals. Our need to be the best at school or work drives us to step on others to get ahead. The need to win at sports can lead us to cheating or injuring others. And the need for popularity can lead to the worst offenses against each other. Our children are getting lost in demands that today’s society is putting on them. And technology, as much as it helps us, is doing the most harm.
We are all beginning to lose ourselves into the digital world. Instead of technology bringing us closer together, it has made us more distant. We are losing the face-to-face love and compassion for each other and we are becoming selfish and self-absorbed. Whether it is five people sitting at home on a couch together or 100 people sitting in church, the focus of most people’s attention is on their phones, smart watches, tablets, and gaming consoles. We are obsessed with social medial like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to the point that it is controlling our lives and the lives of our children. What is the first thing we do in the morning? Do we pray to God that He will help us today, or do we check to see how many likes we got from last night’s post? As a society, we have begun to worry more about what other people think of us, than of what God thinks of us. People are having difficulty seeing the difference between what is right and what is popular, and this thinking is guiding many of our youth down the wrong path.
We have the power to control the importance of social media. We have the power to ignore the negative and encourage the positive. We have the power to prioritize God in our lives and bring each other and our children back to church and to our ministries. And with God in our hearts, we have the power to prevent our spiritual deaths and to help the Lord resurrect those whom we have already lost.