· 23rd Ordinary (B), September 10, 2006
· Theme: God Opens Our Ears to Hear and Our Mouths to Proclaim the Good News

· It is obvious that today’s first reading from the Prophet Isaiah points to the gospel and Jesus’ cure of the deaf man with the speech impediment.
· In those times, a deaf person or anyone suffering an illness would have been considered an incomplete human being.
· Often these people were ostracized from the community as being unclean.
· If such a person were cured, the opposite would have been true; the incomplete person would now be whole.

· Today we realize that a physical malady is not a punishment from God
· Physical handicaps touch all of us to one extent or another.
· However, probably the worst kind of handicap is the kind that cuts us off from others.

Sometimes the separation is physical:
Fr. Sebastian just came back from India where he spent several weeks with his mother and family.
Unfortunately, his mother is loosing her hearing.
Sebastian tells me that it is hard to communicate with her, therefore she feels cut off from her family and her community.
The worst part of her deafness is the isolation from others.

· Most of us here today do not suffer from a serious loss of hearing.
· But the kind of hearing we need for our Christian life is much deeper.
· We are speaking of the hearing that causes a different way of thinking and behaving - something like the apostle James describes in our second reading.
· A community who has heard the gospel would behave quite differently as a result of what was heard.
· They would no longer judge people by the usual standards of Hollywood and the popular press, as James suggests today.

· Sometimes the separation between people is not as much physical as it is prejudicial
· When I was a child I used to play with the kids in the neighborhood.
· We all got along well.
· One day, however, I got angry with one of the kids because he was being stingy with one of his toys.
· I said, “Come on share with us, don’t be a Jew”
· My friend, Mitchell Easterman, said, “Sorry, but that is who I am, a Jew.”
· I was mortified.
· As a matter of fact, until that moment, I did not even realize what I had said was an ethnic slur. It was just an expression that everyone seemed to use.
· I did not get it from my parents; they were amazingly tolerant.
· I went to St. Alphonsus Catholic School – those expressions certainly were not taught there.
· I lived in religiously mixed neighborhood – my friends were Methodists, Jewish, Lutheran and Catholic, and we all lived right next door to each other.
· Where I picked up that childhood expression, I do not know.
· But to this day, I am still embarrassed as I think about the experience.
· That day, my Jewish friend opened my ears so that I could hear that I was saying something very offensive about another human being – a child of God.

· How are our ears opened? How does Jesus remove our “speech impediment?
· The gospel miracle links us to our baptism when our ears were first opened and the process of hearing and speaking God’s Word began.
· As Christians we are called to hear the cry of the poor and the dispossessed in our community and in our world.
· If the Gospel touches our hearts and we respond to the love that the Lord has shown to us, then our mouths will be opened to call our brother and sisters together – no matter what their language, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.

· On Monday, September 11, we will remember what happened in New York and Washington, D.C. five years ago on that date.
· Hate brought about the death of over three thousand good people, many of whom acted heroically.
· Hate then brought many in this country to stereotype all Muslims as terrorists and extremists.

· The Gospel today challenges us to a higher standard, to look beyond our prejudices
· We ask God to open our ears so that we can hear what each other is really saying:
· In families
· In business
· In religion
· In world politics
· We ask God to loosen our tongues so that we can speak of the value of all human life – men and women, old and young, rich and poor, foreign or domestic.

· As we continue with our Liturgy today, let us ask our God, the God of Abraham – the patriarch of Jews, Christians and Muslims – to open our ears and our hearts.
· “Ephphatha ! Be Opened!”

· Amen

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