"Risen and Rising"

Matthew 13:33-35 “Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” In the same way that the farmers in the room pounce on anything I get wrong about crops and livestock, we come to another subject in Jesus’ teachings that will undoubtedly reveal even more of the depths of my ignorance and confirm the vast repository of your wisdom. But I am very willing to be a “fool for Christ” just the same, so here goes! The subject is making bread dough. Some of you know a lot about that subject. You could make a loaf of braided bread, a dozen dinner rolls, delicious muffins and more, but not me. I am pretty helpless, even with a good recipe in front of me. I am worse than helpless without a recipe. One time long ago, my little church in Rochester decided to have a spaghetti dinner. The eighty year olds in the church hadn’t put on a dinner in a long time, so somehow I was given the assignment of visiting ninety year old Gaetana Russo to get her spaghetti recipe. Mrs. Russo never came to Sunday worship anymore, because she was too frail to drive. No one told me that Mrs. Russo, a long time Italian Presbyterian, did not speak much English. And it turned out that she didn’t have a recipe at all to share. She just KNEW how to make the sauce, a handful of this, a couple of these, a pinch of that, and, voilá!, delicious sauce. “Voilá” is French, but Mrs. Russo was definitely Italian, so I looked it up: “Ecco” (EHK-kho!). So as I sat in Mrs. Russo’s apartment I tried – dutifully – to write down all the details, but in the end I really had nothing. And with no recipe I feared the worst. Fortunately, someone else came through with a recipe, I was chased out of the kitchen, and the dinner was a big success for that little church, “ecco!”. This coming week our youth will be volunteering at Cameron Community Ministries in Rochester. Many years ago I was part of a Vacation Bible School at Cameron Community Ministries. One of those days we were teaching a lesson where Jesus says “I am the bread of the world”, so we decided to use a “quick bread” recipe with the children. In my group something went wrong because the dough in the pan was just swimming in oil. We must have mixed up baking with car repair, because it looked like someone added two quarts of oil instead of two cups of it. Yikes, the soggiest bread you ever saw! Now, when making bread dough most recipes call for varying amounts of flour, warm water, egg, sugar, salt, and cooking oil. Nothing confusing about these things. Flour comes from ground-up wheat, water comes from the well or a tap, salt comes from salt pans by the sea, sugar from various things like sugar cane or sugar beets. The cooking oil comes from grinding up various seeds or nuts. All very straight-forward, as long as you follow the recipe correctly. But if I make bread dough that way I will get odd looking bread. It will look something like this: flat. Some of you are already jumping out of your socks in your eagerness to tell me that I forgot to add yeast to the bread dough. If I want fluffy bread, I’ll need needed to add some yeast to the dough. If I forget the yeast, my bread will come out flat. OK, the truth is that I don’t I don’t know much about yeast. So I was talking with the elders of our church on Thursday night about this. Our elders are very smart, of course, and I count on their wisdom and experience. So I learned that yeast does not grow on trees, it isn’t dug up from the ground, it’s not an animal by-product. In fact, I was very surprised to learn that yeast is a fungi, you get it from bread that has gone moldy and bad. But when added to fresh bread dough, the yeast ferments the sugar and produces carbon dioxide, which creates little bubbles in the dough, which causes the dough to expand. So when you mix in the yeast, the dough begins to rise. There was just a little dough at the bottom of the bread pan, but wait a while – how long? – and the dough rises and it fills the pan. Then it’s ready to put in the oven for baking. It comes out a lot fluffier than this flat bread I passed around. How am I doing? I have no idea where you get yeast, other than in these little packets at the store, but if I want fluffy bread we need to add yeast as a leavening agent to the recipe. Now, let’s go back to Jesus’ parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” So what does it mean? What does this simple little parable mean? Why did Jesus teach it? The simple meaning might be: “don’t forget to add the yeast when you are preparing the bread dough”. But this is Jesus speaking, and you know from everything else you’ve ever heard him say that Jesus is not known for his recipes or kitchen tips. When Jesus speaks we expect something deeper, something loftier, something “yeastier”, something that connects us to God like never before. What might be the spiritual meaning for us to find in the parable of the leaven? I said last Sunday that Jesus told parables in a way to turn us on our heads, to pull the rug out from under us, or to break a log-jam in our thinking about God. More than anything else, parables are meant to throw an unexpected surprise our way. How does this simple parable do that? What surprise does it give us? So the first thing we realize is that Jesus isn’t talking about kitchen tips involving a little bit of yeast, he’s trying to tell us that with a little bit of God in you, ecco!, amazing things can happen. That little bit of God in you can expand and multiply and grow in surprising ways. Never underestimate what God can accomplish through you! Three measures of flour. Anyone know how much a “measure” of flour was in Jesus time? Turns out it would be a large quantity, so three measures of it would fill almost ten one gallon milk jugs. That’s a lot of flour, and when you add the yeast and the other ingredients the bread dough would expand even more. Anyone want to guess how much bigger it would get? Double? Triple? Quadruple? One commentary I read said that you could feed 100 to 200 people with that much bread dough using three measures of flour. So this is more than a woman baking a loaf of bread for her family. She was baking dozens and dozens of loaves, something to benefit a large number of people. So the idea that God begins in the small, the same thing we discovered in the parable of the mustard seed, is on an even grander scale here ; a little bit of yeast to leaven the dough feeds several hundred people, ecco! The people of our congregation can be that kind of presence in our town, a small number of us but growing in love and peace and vision. So now, I’m handing out yeast packets that I bought at the store yesterday. You can use yours to bake a loaf of bread, but I hope it will be a focus of your thinking and prayer. Can you be that little bit of something that makes the hopes of everyone around you rise? Welcome just a little bit of God into your life, and it can have the same effect as a little yeast has in dough. You don’t have to absorb or understand or memorize everything about God. Just a tiny bit of God, a word, a verse, a gesture is enough to start. Jesus is risen from the grave, with his help you can experience the same rising. Your Spirit no longer flat at the bottom of the pan, but rising high over the top of the pan. Let this little packet be a challenge to you, to find a little bit of something that God has added to you, so that the hopes of our entire town might rise?