The generation we now call Z has grown up in a multi-platform world, a world in which they can access information in a number of different ways, but they may have lost other vital skills!

‘Generation Z learned to swipe before they could write!’

Generation Z thinks it is more important to have a reliable wifi connection than a reliable bathroom’

Analogue or Digital

Generation Y was the last generation to write a letter!

I remember the day when we got our first and last letter from our Generation Y child. Up to that point, all our other children had written to us regularly from school but this was the last handwritten letter we received and I have preserved it for posterity!

However, all our children belong to what could be called the digital age whereas most of us belong to the analogue generation.

The difference I think is that the analogue generation processes information differently to the digital generation. Analogue people are used to a single medium, usually words, whereas the digital generation uses many different platforms. This means that we, the analogue generation, mainly use only one of the senses God has given us to process information.

The Great East Window York Minster

I use a painting to illustrate my sermon because I believe it helps if we engage more than one sense as we process what we are hearing. In fact I remember learning back at theological college that we remember and retain more, the more of our senses that are employed.

My picture today is not a painting but a stained glass window, because back in the days before literacy was universal, biblical stories were told with pictures. The window contains two biblical cycles, Creation and Revelation, the beginning and the end of all things. Beneath the heavenly realm at the head of the window, populated by angels, prophets, patriarchs, apostles, saints, and martyrs, there are three rows of 27 Old Testament scenes from the Creation to the death of Absalom. Below this, scenes from the Apocalypse appear, with a row of historical figures at the base of the window. You could preach many sermons just from that one window!

Multiple platforms

Music too was important to lift the spirit, and incense to convey the mystery of God. Touch and posture are also used to express worship. Today I would like you to take these holding crosses for a moment as you pray, they may help you to focus. When I was a child we used to sing a little song that went ‘Hands, shoulder, knees, and toes…. and eyes and ears and mouth and nose’ I think there was a little dance that went with it. I’m not sure whether we sang it to remind ourselves where all these parts of the body were, or to exercise, but it reminds me today that there are many more ways to listen to a sermon than sitting on a church pew. Consider for a moment the various ways in which Jesus interacts with the people in this passage.

Interactive Teaching

First, there is the interactive dialogue with the Syrophonesian woman, then there is the encounter with the deaf-mute man who Jesus took aside and stuck his fingers in his ears, and ‘After spitting, touched his tongue’ vs 33.

Only after engaging physically with this man does he speak to him, “Ephphatha”

Later he teaches through the feeding of the four thousand and illustrates his message through the vivid image of broken bread. Just like the little ditty we sang as children Jesus appears to want to engage us by using and even touching every part of our body.

‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes… eyes and ears and mouth and nose’

Holistic Therapy

Jesus then engages with our contemporary culture in many more ways than we do in our churches.

I think that he would have used music therapy to reach disturbed children or aromatherapy to calm stressed executives or maybe started a massage clinic to treat the weary disciples!

In reality, Jesus’ healings were sermons delivered not in words, but by touch and sight, smell and taste. Those who merely heard often went away unaffected, those who merely saw returned home unmoved, but those who responded with their whole being were touched and changed.

Modern medicine has caught up with Jesus's methods but the Church hasn’t. Jesus engaged the whole person, the Church today only seems to engage those parts of us that can receive an analogue message rather than a multiplatform digital one.

The Multi-Sensory Church

It is not just a problem for the Church it is a problem for us analogue Christians, we have learned to engage with parts of our minds but not with all of our bodies, and yet here we are at a service of Holy Communion. What is this if it is not a multi-sensory experience?

We hear the Word but we also receive the Bread and the Wine because that too is the message now acted out in the Breaking and Sharing of the Bread and the Pouring out of the Wine. Holy Communion asks us to engage with our whole bodies:

To come forward, to kneel, to put out our hands and eat, to open our mouths and drink. To taste and smell, to share in the body and blood of Christ.

Engaging the Spirit

There is one dimension we have not mentioned. The spiritual, for Jesus, did not just engage the body and mind he engaged with the spirit of each person.

‘’And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha” that is be opened. Mark 7:34

As Jesus engaged with this deaf-mute there was a struggle going on at a spiritual level. Jesus was engaging with more than the man’s body and mind he was engaging with his spirit. It appears that just as his mouth was locked up and his ears closed so too his spirit was imprisoned and the implication is that until his spirit could be freed neither his body nor mind could be.

“ Be opened” then reminds us that there is a dimension within each of us that words cannot reach, which even bread and wine cannot nourish. A part of us that will not respond without a struggle though we may be doing all the right things with our bodies and even believing all the right things with our minds.

As we kneel and hold out our hands, as we open our mouths there is another part of us with which Jesus asks us to open up, our spirits.

For us analogue Christians this may be the hardest part of us to release, but only as our spirits are released can we experience the full spectrum of a multidimensional, multi-sensory, multi-coloured, and even multi-generational world.