My brothers and sisters, grace and peace to you this morning.

In our Gospel today from Mark, chapter seven, we hear of a man brought to Jesus who was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech. And the people besought Christ to lay His hand upon him. But notice what Jesus does. The text says, "And he took him aside from the multitude." Before there is any healing, before there is any word spoken, there is this quiet act of withdrawal. Christ does not perform this miracle in the middle of the crowd, with all its noise and pressing and shouting. He takes the man away, privately, to a place set apart.

I want us to sit with that detail, because I think it speaks directly to our condition today. This man was surrounded — surrounded by people, by voices, by the crush of Galilean crowds who followed Jesus wherever He went. And in the midst of all that noise, he could not hear anyway. He was already deaf. Yet Jesus still leads him out of it, away from the multitude, before touching his ears.

Brothers and sisters, we are deaf people too. Not medically, perhaps, but spiritually. We live surrounded by noise of a kind that man in Galilee could never have imagined — the constant hum of notifications, the endless scroll, the news cycle that never sleeps, the voices competing for our attention from the moment we wake until the moment we close our eyes at night. We are, in a very real sense, always in the multitude, even when we are sitting alone in a room. Our phones bring the crowd to us.

And here is the hard truth: like that man, we may already be deaf and not know it. Not deaf to sound — we hear plenty of sound — but deaf to the one Voice that matters most. The noise of the world does not merely compete with God's word; it can drown it out entirely, so that even when Scripture is read, even when the homily is preached, even when the still small voice speaks in our conscience, we do not hear it. We have grown accustomed to a certain static, and we mistake that static for silence.

This is why Christ's first act is so instructive. He does not heal the man in the crowd. He takes him aside. He removes him from the source of the noise before He ever touches him. And I believe this is exactly what the Lord desires to do with each of us. Before He can open our ears to His word, He must first lead us out — out of the scroll, out of the noise, out of the multitude of voices — into some quiet place where He alone can speak.

This is, in fact, what we do here at Mass. Even in this gathering of many, the liturgy itself is meant to be that "aside" place — a space set apart from the noise of the week, where Christ leads us privately into His presence. But how often do we carry the multitude in with us? How often do our minds remain scrolling even as our bodies sit still in the pew?

Christ's example calls us to something deliberate: to actually let ourselves be led aside. Not simply to reduce noise, but to allow Christ to remove us from it, trusting that what He wants to say to us cannot be heard amid the crowd.

Once Jesus has taken the man aside, Mark tells us exactly what happens next: "And he put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened."

This word — Ephphatha — is one of the few times in the Gospels where Mark preserves the very Aramaic word that came from the lips of Jesus. It is worth pausing on that. The Evangelist could easily have simply translated it into Greek, as he does everywhere else. But here he keeps the original sound, as if to say: remember this word. Hold onto it. Be opened.

And what is remarkable is that this is not merely a moment of physical healing — it is the fulfillment of prophecy. Turn with me in your mind to the prophet Isaiah, chapter thirty-five, verse five: "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped." Isaiah spoke these words centuries before, as a promise of what God Himself would do when He came to save His people. And here, in this small, unnamed man in the region of Decapolis, that ancient promise is made flesh. The ears of the deaf are unstopped, not by human medicine, not by human effort, but by the very word and touch of God.

Notice too how physical, how bodily, this miracle is. Christ does not simply speak from a distance. He puts His fingers into the man's ears. He touches his tongue. He sighs, looking up to heaven — a groan that echoes the groaning of all creation longing for redemption, as Saint Paul writes in Romans. This is no abstract, spiritual-only healing. God enters into the actual stopped-up ears of a real man and speaks the word that unstops them.

This, brothers and sisters, is what our own deafness requires. It is not enough for us to simply try harder to concentrate, to will ourselves into attentiveness, to set a timer and put the phone in another room — though these things may help. What we need, fundamentally, is the touch and the word of Christ Himself. Our ears will not be opened by our own effort alone. They must be opened by Him.

So when we ask the Lord to cut through the static of our daily noise, we are not asking for a mere technique of self-discipline. We are asking for a miracle — for the same divine touch that unstopped the ears of that man in Galilee to unstop our own. We are asking Christ to look up to heaven, to sigh over us, and to speak that same word: Ephphatha. Be opened.

The Gospel concludes with a curious detail. Jesus charges the people to tell no man. And yet, Mark says, "the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it." They could not help themselves. "And were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak."

There is something deeply true to human experience here. When ears are truly opened — when someone has genuinely heard something wonderful — silence becomes almost impossible. The proclamation flows naturally from the hearing. This is the order the Gospel shows us: first Christ opens the ears, and only then does the tongue loosen to speak rightly. Not the other way around. We cannot proclaim what we have not first truly heard.

This matters greatly for how we think about evangelization, about bearing witness to Christ in our families and workplaces. So often we feel pressure to speak, to have the right words, to defend the faith articulately — and that pressure can be paralyzing. But the Gospel today reminds us that the words will come, almost unbidden, once the hearing has truly happened. The crowd was not told to go and preach; they simply could not stop themselves. Their proclamation was the overflow of what they had witnessed and heard.

So, brothers and sisters, as we leave this church today and return to our homes, our phones, our noise-filled lives, let us carry this Gospel with us not as a story about a man long ago, but as a prayer for ourselves. Let us ask Christ to do for us exactly what He did for that deaf man in Decapolis: to take us aside, away from the multitude of notifications and distractions, if only for a few quiet minutes each day; to touch our ears with His grace; and to speak over us that same ancient word — Ephphatha.

Perhaps this week that means beginning or ending each day with a few minutes of real silence before opening a screen. Perhaps it means sitting with Sacred Scripture, even a single verse, and simply listening rather than scrolling past it. Whatever practical shape it takes, the invitation is the same one given to that man two thousand years ago: to be led aside, to be touched by Christ, and to be opened.

For if our ears are truly opened to His word, then like that crowd in Galilee, we too will find that we cannot help but speak of Him — not because we are told to, but because we have genuinely heard, and heard well, the One who has done, and continues to do, all things well.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Ephphatha is an Aramaic word spoken by Jesus that means "Be opened." In Mark 7:31-37, Jesus uses this word when healing a deaf man. Fr. Dan's sermon applies this miracle to modern Christians, teaching that Christ still opens spiritually deaf ears so believers can hear God's voice above the noise and distractions of everyday life.