Matthew 13:31-34; 44-52
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Jason M. Haddox
When Shannon and I lived in New Jersey, I baked bread every
week. Six cups of flour made enough
bread for the two of us weekly, plus (often) a loaf to give away. So I wondered about this parable of Jesus’: “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.” (Matt. 13:33) How much is “a measure”?
Three measures sounds like a relatively small amount. Three cups, maybe double that to make six. Enough dough for two good-sized loaves. Perhaps even double that again, to imagine a four-cup measure—that’s the biggest measuring cup in my kitchen. Four cups times three measures is twelve cups. That’s quite a lot of flour, right?
Except that’s not even close to Jesus’ bread recipe this
morning. The word translated as
“measure” of flour in the gospel this morning—a single “measure”—contained
somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds of flour.
You know those five pound bags of Lily White unbleached
all-purpose flour they stock at Publix?
Imagine twelve of those five-pound bags lined up on the
kitchen table, waiting to go into the mixing bowl.
Imagine the mixing bowl into which twelve five-pound bags of
flour would fit.
Imagine the quantity of dough that would be made by such an
undertaking.
Imagine the wooden spoon—as big as a kitchen broom—used to
mix the yeast into the dough.
And about the yeast. Jesus
isn’t talking about those tidy little red-and-yellow envelopes of Fleishmann’s
dry yeast pellets on the shelf above the bags of flour. He’s talking about sourdough starter.
If you’ve worked with sourdough starter, you know that it is
gooey and smelly and more than a bit temperamental. Added to flour and salt, it rises into bread
dough. Added to wheat and hops and
water, it creates beer (which Benjamin Franklin stated was proof that God loves
us and wants us to be happy, but that’s another sermon altogether.) Exactly how this weird smelly stuff works is
mysterious. And when it’s mentioned in
the Bible it is always used as a symbol of corruption and uncleanness. The bread of remembrance in the Passover meal
is unleavened—perhaps a rejection of all that the children of Israel had
suffered in Egypt, where both baking leavened bread and brewing beer were
important industries. In the first
letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells his hearers: “Do you not know that a
little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?
Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really
are unleavened. For Christ, our
Passover, has been sacrificed for us.
Therefore let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the
yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and
truth.” (1 Cor. 5:6-8)
But here in this tiny parable, Jesus takes that symbol of
yeast—smelly, gooey, strange, and highly suspect—and uses it to talk about
something that is just as weird and mysterious.
The Kingdom of God, to which Jesus has been pointing his hearers all
along. “The kingdom of heaven is like
yeast…which a woman took and mixed in with flour….”
Our English Bibles tell us that the woman “mixed in” the
yeast. That’s good standard baking
advice—one does want the leavening agent to be well distributed through the
dough before the bread is baked—but it’s a lousy translation. What Jesus actually says is that the woman
“HID” the leaven in the flour.
Think of that for a moment.
The yeast—Jesus’ chosen symbol of the kingdom, in this parable—is
hidden. Invisible from ordinary sight,
yet slowly and steadily working its hidden magic in and through that whole
enormous bowlful of dough. Sixty pounds
of flour, plus the hidden yeast, aerating and lifting and swelling up to the
edge of that enormous mixing bowl, over the edge, spilling out onto the kitchen
table, onto the floor, filling the whole room.
It cannot stay hidden for long, not like that.
My mother tells a story from her college days, where her
dormitory on the edge of the campus sat just across the street from a large
commercial bakery. Every morning at
about 3:30 a.m. the ovens would be loaded for the first batch of the day, and
the smell of fresh bread would drift—no, it would pour, cascade, flood out into
the surrounding streets and homes for several blocks in every direction. There was no missing it, that fragrance
entered every door and window in the vicinity.
What does the kingdom of God smell like?
What fragrance accompanies the presence of God?
“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast…which a woman took.”
Jesus uses a particularly feminine image in this parable, to
talk about God’s activity in the world.
It is not an image of great power in the usual triumphant sense, banners
and parades and cheering crowds. It is,
in a way, the very opposite of such power—this power is hidden in a bowl, on a
kitchen table, measured and mixed, kneaded and rolled and baked by strong,
flour-covered hands. The hands of a
mother, a grandmother, an aunt…someone at once perfectly ordinary, and at the
same time extraordinary. A worker of
miracles. A magician, whose magic will
bring forth miraculous food for many.
Jesus, the Bread of Life, puts the work of God’s kingdom into a woman’s
hands.
The day after tomorrow, the 29th of July, is the
feast of Sts. Mary and Martha of Bethany.
Two sisters, whose names we know, who ministered to Jesus, who were
among his closest friends. It is also
the fortieth anniversary of the ordination of eleven women, the first women to
be ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church.
It happened in Philadelphia, on a humid Monday morning in 1974, in the
Church of the Advocate. Three retired
bishops laid hands on eleven women deacons, conferring apostolic ordination
upon them in the presence of two thousand witnesses. The service did not go unnoticed; there were
more than a few objections in the days and months that followed. “Irregular,” the House of Bishops would say
later. “Uncanonical.”
And so two years later in Minneapolis, the General Convention rewrote
canon law to admit that—in fact—the Holy Spirit was up to something new and
transforming in the Episcopal Church.
And we, my brothers and sisters, have been immeasurably blessed and
enriched by that new thing. I have heard
you tell stories of Sr. Elena here at St. Augustine’s, her love and leadership
among you. Sister Ellen Frances and my
dear Texas friend and colleague St. Miriam Elizabeth have blessed us in this
parish, and gone in service to many in their work as ministers of the gospel.
Last Sunday the Rev. Julia Sierra Wilkinson Reyes of Christ
Church, Savannah (whom Scott Benhase, the tenth bishop of Georgia, fondly
refers to as “the twelfth bishop of Georgia”) welcomed the Most Reverend
Katherine Jefferts-Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, into the
pulpit of the mother church of Georgia. As of only a few days ago, women can be
elected as bishops in the Church of England, even perhaps to the office of
Archbishop of Canterbury. Jesus’ image
of a woman holding, handling, sharing the “stuff” of the Kin-dom of God is
being made manifest in our own time.
This is God’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast…in the hands of a
woman…hidden in an abundance of flour…until it was all leavened and raised and
filled with life.”
And they will move us—if we allow them—beyond our own places
of comfort and security.
Where is God, the baker-woman, kneading and stretching you,
beyond your usual places of comfort and safety this week?
Where are you called to be bread, abundant, fragrant, and
delicious, for a hungry community today?
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