Sermon: The Parable Of The Yeast

[powerpress]http://www.fuub.org/home/home/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The-Parable-Of-The-Yeast.m4a[/powerpress]

I have two children and they are both 4 years old. They’re twins named Micah and Miriam. They love each other a lot and they also fight a lot. They want everything to be exactly fair. If you give one of them something, you have to give the other one exactly the same thing or else! If one gets milk, the other wants milk. If one gets an apple, the other wants an apple. If one gets to walk the dog with me, the other one wants to walk the dog with me. Even things that I don’t think are very special or very fun, they want to make sure are exactly fair. So when I print out my sermon on Sunday morning, Micah asks if he can take the papers out of the printer for me. And if I say yes, Miriam will wail, “I wanted to take the papers out of the printer!” I let her know that I will be printing out more papers and she can take those out of the printer and her indignation subsides. But she still doesn’t like that her brother got to do it first.

 

These fights are not really about milk or apples or dog walking or printer paper. They’re really about love. Kids sometimes think (and grownups, too, sometimes think) that love is like a pie, and if you give some to one kid, there’s less for another kid. And so the more people you have in your life who you love, the less love each one gets. Makes perfect sense if love is like a pie, because pie gets used up. But love isn’t really like a pie. Love is more like yeast.

 

What is yeast? “Yeast,” according to Adam Gopnick, one of my favorite writers in the world, “is really just a bunch of bugs rooming together, like Oberlin grads in Brooklyn… organisms of the fungus kingdom… When you mix the little bugs with a carbohydrate—wet wheat is a good one—they begin to eat up all the oxygen in it, and then they pass gas… The gas they pass causes the dough to rise. It’s what puts the bubbles in the bread.” So basically, he’s saying, bread rises and becomes bread because of the farts of little tiny bugs. (Can I say “fart” in a sermon, you might be wondering? Only if there are children present.) And, here’s the important part, the yeast has babies; the yeast makes more yeast which can make more bread rise.

 

Jesus once talked about yeast in one of his stories. He loved to tell stories that seemed to be about one thing, but were really about something else. This story that seemed to be about yeast was the shortest one he ever told. It’s only one sentence long. To understand this very short story, you have to know the word “leavened.” When something is “leavened,” it means that it’s big and puffy and soft like bread, instead of hard and flat like a cracker. So Jesus gathered all of his followers around him and he said, “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.”

 

Three measures of flour was a lot of flour – enough to fill a whole bathtub – so he was talking about someone taking a little, tiny bit of yeast and mixing it into a lot of flour. And just that little bit of yeast was so powerful, so strong, so special, it didn’t get used up. It grew and grew and grew and eventually leavened the whole thing.

 

Have any of you ever tried to make bread from scratch? It’s magic, isn’t it? You take some yeast and some warm water, something sweet like sugar or honey, and some flour, maybe a little salt. You mix it all together and give it a little deep-tissue massage. Then you tuck it in under a blanket in a warm, safe place and it starts to grow. Like an animal – like a living thing – it grows and it gets warm – really, really warm. Then you massage it some more – it’s spongy and soft – and then you let it grow some more and then you put it in the oven and bake it. Pretty soon the whole kitchen, maybe the whole apartment, starts to smell amazing. It’s a warm, cozy smell. And when it’s done, it’s all golden brown and crusty and yummy, just like the bread we had earlier. It’s one whole, beautiful thing and you can’t believe that not too long ago, it was just a spoonful of this and a pile of that.

 

We people are like that too. When we start out, we’re just a spoonful of this and a pile of that. And then if someone gives us some sweetness and some warmth and maybe some massages now and then, we grow and get big and turn into ourselves! And, just like bread, we need a special ingredient, our own kind of yeast, to leaven us. We need a special ingredient to help us rise up and become what we are meant to be. For us – for people – that special ingredient is love.

 

I think when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven,” this is what he was talking about – the place and the time where love is everywhere, where everyone loves and everyone is loved. And just like yeast, he was saying, love doesn’t get used up. You just need a little, tiny bit and you need for someone to give it a chance and it makes more and more of itself. It can change the lives of more and more and more people, helping them all rise up to become what they are meant to be. Even lots of people. A whole bathtub full of people! It doesn’t matter! And here’s the amazing thing: you don’t even need to have any yeast to start out with. You don’t need to go and get it; you don’t need to buy it in a store. Just like love, yeast is just in the air around us, waiting for something to attach to. It’s true!

 

This is how Adam Gopnick explains it: “You can mix up water and wheat …put it out in the air, and wait for all the wild yeast that’s drifting around in the schmutz of the kitchen to land on it and start eating the carbohydrates. This yeast tends to have more character than the yeast that you buy in the store, because, as every dog knows, the schmutz on the kitchen floor has more flavor than anything else. …The long-cherished deposit of ancient schmutz—a spongy mess that you can use day after day and even decade after decade… is called, no kidding, ‘the mother.’”

 

Love is just like that. Where does it come from? Who knows? The air? God? Leftover love schmutz from other times and places? But if you give it a chance and open your heart, that love can just grow and grow and grow. So I hope that all of us, as we go into the holiday season with all the good smells of fresh breads and pies, and all of the good stuff and the hard stuff of being with family, will remember this. You don’t have to fight for love; you don’t have to worry about who’s getting more or less. You don’t have to hold any back or save any for later. Love will never run out; love will never get used up. Love is like yeast: we’ll mix it in well and there will be enough for us all.