Today our teaching scripture is from Matthew chapter 13, verse
33. He 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. This is the word of the Lord.
So an interesting outcome of the pandemic was a massive rise in
the practice of making bread. Trapped at home, people dusted
off their wedding present KitchenAid mixers and began
mixing and kneading and baking until the stores were literally
running out of flour. I think that one outcome of that
was just a deeper appreciation for the rhythms and connection
with how our food is made and the value of Labor.
It seems that we're rediscovering the way in which,
if you take just a little bit of effort into your food, you can
have a way to interact in a way beyond physical movement being
so constrained. And we were not exempt from this
phenomena. While I had been making homebred
bread for a while, I worked at a hospital, so my work just kept
proceeding as mostly normal. But Tori, who is the extrovert
in our relationship, was stuck at home and decided to take up
bread baking. But soon the stores began to run
out not only a flour, but also yeast.
So Tori began the process of cultivating and caring for a
sourdough starter. If I had to guess, she was not
the only one in this room who did that.
If you are one of the many people who picked up a sourdough
habit in the midst of the lockdown, I think you're a
little ways ahead in the sermon. Because that's what our parable
is about. It's about the rising of bread.
But the leaven that the parable talks about or the yeast that it
talks about isn't those little tiny packets of things you can
buy at the store. It's a sourdough starter, a
living, breathing Organism that every week people take and mix
flour into until it is all leavened.
So we'll come back to those sourdough starters that are
maybe still growing in your fridge.
But if you haven't been with us for a few weeks, since Easter,
we've been in the sermon series on the Kingdom of God, and we've
been looking at one of the parables of Jesus each week.
So the parables are one of the key ways that Jesus seems to
have taught people in his public ministry.
So we have a lot of them recorded in the Bible.
There are some examples in the Bible of sermons by Jesus, most
famously earlier in Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount.
But a very large portion of his teaching comes through these
parables. So right after our passage for
this morning, Matthew writes that Jesus told the crowds all
these things in parables without a parable.
He told them nothing. So parables are just simply
short stories that have some like key observation or metaphor
to kick them off. What I often imagine Jesus doing
is sitting and noticing something happening around him
and saying the Kingdom of God is like this thing here.
This would have been a typical way in which a rabbi in Jesus's
time would have instructed his followers.
But why does Jesus speak in parables like this?
I think there are a number of answers to that question.
The first one I would note is just this is, in part, a
pedagogical tool. Stories are more memorable than
lectures. They capture our imagination.
When we hear a story, we begin to picture ourselves in it.
We begin to imagine like what happened next.
What's the motivation for all of these characters?
We can ask questions and wonder together, what could this mean?
What could it mean for us? This is what all good
storytellers do. They draw, capture you, and they
draw you in. If you want to evidence of that,
just listen to podcasts. They're full of this all the
time. New Testament scholar Amy Jill
Levine says that parables and the tellers of parables, we're
there to prompt the reader or the hearer to see the world in a
different way, to challenge and at times to indict.
And Jesus is a good teacher. He knows how to do all of this,
how to let the parables challenge what is hearers knew
to be true. I want to draw attention to
another aspect of parables too, and that's in that they don't
mean only one thing. In a parable, there can be
different layers of meaning that you peel back, and sometimes if
you look at it a little differently, you might see
something else that might hit you differently depending on
whatever is going on in your life when you come to the
parable. And it's easy to get anxious
about that. I know sometimes when people say
that a parable might mean multiple things, because so
often what we really want are these clearly logically laid out
systems where one thing leads to the next and leads to the next,
and we can just put everything into its box and we can control
it. We want to know what everything
means and how it relates to everything else.
And while that might be be good if you're writing like a
systematic theology textbook, it's not really a great way to
make sense of these parables that Jesus has for us.
Because all of these parables are enigmatic and weird, and
they resist being nailed down to mean only one thing.
And that's OK. Because of what Jesus is doing
in these parables isn't trying to get us to believe rightly
that if we get the right propositions and everything is
OK. What Jesus is trying to do is
invite us into a relationship with him, to enter into this
bigger story that he's trying to get us to grasp through these
little short stories that he tells.
The point of parables is not to be understood, but to be lived
out in our lives. So Amy Jo Levine, again, the New
Testament scholar, says that when we come to parables, we
might be better off thinking less about what they mean and
more about what they can do. They remind, provoke, refine,
confront, and disturb. So when we read the parables
rightly, we don't always come up with this stable meaning for all
time, where we're sure exactly what it means and no matter
where you read it. But instead, as we read these
parables and listen to them, we let them transform our lives.
We let them confront the ways that we believe the world to be,
and ultimately, we let them bring us into encounter with the
Kingdom of God, which is what Jesus is talking about so often
through his ministry. And I think the Kingdom of God,
just a simple way to think about it, is when the world is
organized and structured and going as Jesus would have it to
go. And when we think about the
Kingdom of God, Jesus is always there at the center of it.
And so all of that that I'm saying about parables, I think
it's going to affect how we come to this parable this morning.
So rather than trying to say exactly what this parable means
for us, I want to invite you to come along with me looking at
the reality of the Kingdom of God through different ways of
reading this parable. We can be open to multiple
meanings. We can gesture at something that
might be there. It's a little strange, it's
mysterious. And maybe together we can just
trust that the Holy Spirit will lead us in the midst of all of
that wondering together. And so if we're trying to be led
by the Spirit, would you just pray with me this morning?
Spirit, I do pray that you would guide our attention in this
parable that Jesus told, that you would let the pieces of it
that each of us need to hear confront our hearts that we
might be challenged and changed and ultimately come to encounter
Jesus in the midst of it. Amen.
So I'll read the parable just one more time, which, as Tory
mentioned, won't take long. It's only one verse.
So we 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.
You might hear that and think, why are you talking about all
this mystery and enigma, and what's so strange about it?
It seems like a pretty straightforward story.
There's one character, there's a woman who's going about the
normal life in her household. And at one level that's true.
And that's the first thing that I do want to note about this
parable, how ordinary it is. So Parker spent the last two
weeks talking about the Pearl of Great price and a treasure
hidden in a field. They're both great sermons.
You should go listen to them in the podcast feed.
But those are dramatic, new, exciting things that we talked
about running into something in our life that radically shifts
its direction and changes our lives in a complete way.
And even when pearls or treasures are something that did
happen in the world, they'd be so out of the ordinary kneading
bread dough. That's not really the quite the
adventure movie vibe, unless maybe you like those like art
house films where someone needs dough for a really long time and
it's really artistic. But I think part of what Jesus
is getting at here is talk about the Kingdom of God, is that the
Kingdom of God penetrates all of the areas of our life, not just
those big dramatic moments that we can look back on and say,
This is why my life completely changed.
That's part of why I love that this parable is in the same
chapter as the ones that Parker talked about, the Pearl and the
treasure. Yes, the Kingdom of heaven is
like a treasure and a Pearl that we sell our whole lives for, but
it's also like the most ordinary things in our lives, Our Daily
Bread that we need to consume to sustain us.
It's like the ordinary work that probably at times feels like
drudgery of a woman laboring in a kitchen to provide for her
family. Jesus, by holding these parables
together, interrupts us before we get too far down this path of
only looking at the things that are really dramatic and
important, he said. Instead, he interrupts us and
maybe he says, look at this ordinary part of your life.
Look at the dough that you probably had to make already
this week. So maybe in the last couple of
weeks you thought, oh, only these big important things
matters. But this parable of the 11 draws
our attention deeply to those parts of our lives we are prone
to discount. Let me say this morning that
Jesus cares about all of that in your life beyond just this first
level of ordinariness. I think there's actually more
strangeness in this parable than we notice at first because we're
at a disadvantage because we're reading it in English.
So when I was talking about Amy Jill Levine, she, the New
Testament scholar, she translates the parable like
this. Similar to the Kingdom of heaven
is leaven that a woman taking hid in three measures of flour
until was leavened all. Now, do you notice the
difference for the first difference is it sounds kind of
weird and stilted, but that's what New Testament scholars do.
But what I would notice is the word hid.
Usually in all of our English translations it says mixed, but
New Testament scholars say it really just says hidden there or
she hid it in the things, which is a weird way to talk about it.
Sourdough starter is not something that is easily hidden.
For one thing, it's so sticky it will cover anything that it
touches. So it's kind of hard to imagine
being at put somewhere unnoticed.
So why does Jesus choose this word hidden?
I think at least part of the hiddenness is what I was talking
about a few minutes ago. These small hidden parts of our
lives are the areas we actually find the surprising work of God.
So that's one invitation that I want to give you this morning.
Take time to slow down and notice what God has hidden
inside of you. Don't feel like you have to be
on the lookout for this giant big thing.
Sometimes the work that God is doing and you feels pretty
hidden or small, and sometimes that's what the Kingdom of God
is like. So if you're just not even sure
how to begin to go about settling in and looking for
those hidden parts of your lives, one thing I would
encourage you is the prayer practice of examine.
If you were here last year, we had a series on prayer and Jared
gave a sermon on Examine. I'd go listen to it.
He's going to do much more than I can do.
And one minute, but a basic level and examine.
You sit down in prayer often at the end of the day, but if
you're really tired at night, it's OK to sit down in the
morning and live, reflect on the day before.
And you sit and you imagine yourself in God's presence,
God's loving gaze shining upon you.
And then you review your day with God.
You look back over the day giving thanks for the places
where you feel like you want to give thanks, noticing where you
felt close to God or where you felt distant, where you felt
yourself drawing close to God, or where you felt yourself
turning just a little bit away. And as you look back over your
day, notice those points the Spirit highlights for you and
then offer it all back to God. Scare as you lean into rest if
you're doing it at the end of the day.
So it's really simple, but that can sometimes make us a more
attentive to the places where God has hidden something in our
lives. For me at least, what I have
often noticed when undertaking a practice of examine is gratitude
for really small things in my life.
For ways the Kingdom of God is breaking in, in ways that I
wouldn't have paid attention to if I didn't slow down.
Maybe it's in the warmth of the sun when I'm sitting on my porch
and actually feeling at rest. Maybe it's the Co worker slowing
down enough to ask a real and curious question in a
conversation. Maybe it's responding with just
a little bit more grace to that person at work who really annoys
me. Those small pieces don't sound
like much, but for me to be made attentive to the Kingdom of God,
it's particularly helpful to see these small pieces because I at
least contend towards cynicism. When I look out at the world and
see all the ways in which things are so often falling apart, it's
really easy for me to see the negative.
I don't always slow down to see what is it that God is stirring
up in me in these hidden ways. So there's a saying, often
attributed to the Catholic Worker movement activist Dorothy
Day, that says everyone wants a revolution, but no one wants to
do the dishes. It seems likely that probably
wasn't spoken by Day. It's more apocryphal, but it
gives us something important about the Kingdom of God.
We can big dream these big dreams of transformation for the
world, but if our relationship with Jesus doesn't affect the
way we do things as simple as washing the dishes, then we
might be missing out on some of this hidden ordinariness of the
Kingdom. But beyond just this small
hidden thing, I think that the use of this word hide introduces
something more to the parable. The woman's actions become a
little bit subversive or secretive.
Maybe I'm just a suspicious person, but when I imagine
someone hiding something, I'm like, are they should be maybe
hiding that? Why is it hiding there?
You don't usually hide things that are life giving and good,
like the Kingdom of God. What is it she's trying to
conceal? Is this yeast supposed to be in
this flower? And the question becomes even
more real when you think about the way that yeast shows up in
the rest of the biblical narrative with an
oversimplification to say that yeast or leaven is always good
or always bad. At times in the Bible, it's
mostly neutral. But the things you think about
are the Israelites in the Old Testament at Passover would
remove all of the leaven from their houses.
Just a side note, that means it's not all bad because they
had it in their house to begin with.
But for some reason, sometimes there's this leaven you have to
move out of your house. And just a few chapters later in
Matthew, there's this other saying of Jesus that the Gospels
records that says beware the leaven of the Pharisees and
Sadducees. So it seems that hidden leaven
isn't always a good thing. There can be something hidden in
our lives that's actually turned away from the Kingdom of God
that we're invited towards. We do have to be attentive to
what is it that is bubbling up in our lives.
Is it the good of God's Kingdom? Does it lead more towards the
way God would desire for the world and our lives to look?
Or is it the leaven or the yeast of self-reliance of refusing to
see the work that God is doing in US?
Do we, like the Pharisees, not see the good work that God is
doing by being caught up in our own ideas of what the Kingdom of
God should look like? And distinguishing between this
good leaven and this bad leaven sounds really easy at 1st.
And sure, sometimes it's really simple.
You can look at something and say like this is the good thing,
this is the bad thing. I should only I should do the
good thing. So a lot harder than that in
real life. But a lot of times I think
discernment comes in when we're choosing between two good
things. Are we looking for the thing in
our life to the start of it's going to double and triple in
size. We're looking at this good other
good thing that is not actually the thing God has hidden in our
hearts. This anemic one that doesn't
even have any oven spring. Once it goes in the fire, you
have to look for the thing that Jesus has actually hidden inside
of you. Because Jesus is telling us the
story. Let's just set aside this good
and bad leaven and assume that it is good for a minute.
Something has been hidden deep inside of you.
Something small, but something that is going to grow and be
transformed until the whole 3 measures the flower are
leavened. And now I know there may be some
of you here. That just doesn't feel true.
Maybe this morning you feel aimless, like you've lost the
thread of your life. Maybe you feel like you had this
really clear grasp of your purpose at one point, and that's
kind of faded away and you're not exactly sure what this next
step is. Or maybe you just started to
doubt that there's really any point at all and we should just
eat, drink, and be merry before our impending deaths.
That feels true for you this morning.
If you resonate with some of those questions, I'd invite you
back to this parable to see the action of the woman who I think
from 1 lens, shows us what Jesus is like.
Jesus is like the woman who has hidden something inside of you,
himself, his Kingdom. And even if you aren't aware of
it, even if it feels like a secret to you, it is there and
it's hidden and we can look for it, or at least look for its
results. I really do believe that inside
each of you, Jesus has placed a piece of himself that is drawing
you closer to Him. If that doesn't feel true for
you, though, I'd really encourage you to come and get
prayer after the sermon. We're going to have people on
the side to pray for you. And if you want to say I'd have
no idea what this hidden thing is that Jesus has done for me,
we'd love to pray that God would just reveal that to you this
morning. So let's go back to the parable
again to take a look at a different part of the story.
Similar to the Kingdom of heaven is leaven that a woman taking
hidden 3 measures of flour until was leavened all until was
leavened all. That's what I next want to focus
on. In this passage.
The leaven of heaven became mixed in with the flour until
the whole dough is filled with this yeast.
You know, I said we'd come back to those sourdough starters that
you have in your fridge that you may have been neglecting for a
few months. So sourdough starter needs to be
fed regularly. When you feed a starter, you
take a piece of the starter, you add more flour and water to it,
and over time, just sitting on the counter, it starts bubbling
up until it's all starter. You can no longer pull back out
the flour that you added to it by putting the starter in.
Eventually everything turns into the leaven, and I think that's
part of what Jesus is getting at in this parable.
Whatever it is that God has hidden inside your heart will
not stop growing until it consumes everything.
So in Luke, we read from Jesus that for nothing is hidden that
will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not
become known and come to light. And this, I think, is one of the
joys of this parable. So at times I think when people
hear this passage here about nothing is hidden that will not
be disclosed, we hear it with like a lot of fear and this
negative voice of Oh no, what is going to come up that I don't
want to be revealed to others. Maybe that's true.
I do actually think that in the fullness of the Kingdom, when
everything is revealed, it will feel a lot more like liberation
than shame because I don't think that's what Jesus is inviting us
towards. But I think that in the light of
this parable, this verse is actually a hopeful one too.
So I want you to know this morning that God has, like the
woman in the story, hidden some leaven in your life.
The Kingdom of God is working within you, and at times it
feels so small that you might not even notice it, but it's
there. And on top of that, the other
good news that I want you to hear this morning is that God's
not going to leave that piece of you hidden.
Rather, the thing that God has placed in you will come out and
grow and bear fruit eventually in the Longview, which I think
is the only view that God actually looks at our lives
with. God will take and consume
everything in your life until it reflects the Kingdom of God.
The work that God is doing in you is God's work and God will
bring it to fruition and this journey will take the rest of
your life, the growth of the Kingdom of God in your life.
This taking over of everything isn't about destroying the good
things in your life. This is not a cancer that is
growing the multiplication of cells without purpose.
Rather, the growth of the Kingdom of God in your life is
organic and slow and cooperative.
When yeast grows, it's not destroying what was already
there. It's growing alongside it,
shifting and changing over time in a way that's often almost
imperceptible to us. So for anyone who has ever made
bread, sitting and watching and waiting for it to rise is an
almost impossible task. But suddenly you look back and
you realize, oh, it is doubled inside my kit in size.
My kitchen is warmer than I thought it was.
So this is the kind of growth that God is building in your
life. At times it's unseen, but when
you look back over your life over the long haul, you're able
to notice it. For me personally, when I think
about looking back over things in my life, one way this has
come up really clearly is in the way in which I pray.
So this sounds very strange, and I think I've told this story in
a sermon before, but I spent most of my early Christian life
having really no idea how to pray.
It was not the spiritual discipline that felt like easily
accessible to me at all. But over time, through
relationship with others, by trying on prayer and fits and
starts, through conversation with a spiritual director, I
found myself at some point praying.
And I can't really point to a particular time when it started
or it happened. This is the big time when
everything changed and suddenly it worked out.
But when I look back at my life, at some point, the yeast bubbled
up in such a way that a deeper connection with God in prayer
came to fruition. And I'm so thankful that God is
the one who's doing that work, not me.
And I would just invite you to think back over your life.
Is there things in your life where you've been wanting
something to change? And you might not have even
noticed it, but sometimes you just look and like, oh, that's
happened. And I didn't even know that it
was coming. Sometimes the sort of slow
organic growth is really hard for us to grasp because we're so
used to images of power that consume and dominate rather than
cooperate. We're so used to limitless
growth in a short time, as demanded by basically everything
in our society. That's not what the Kingdom of
God is like. Rather, the Kingdom of God is
particular to you. It's unique and slow and
organic, and it's not overpowering you.
Rather, like the air bubbling up through dough, the Kingdom of
God is bubbling up in your life, forming into something new, but
not something unrecognizable. The Kingdom of God is patient
and it takes time, just as the rising of bread takes time, and
the work that God is doing in you will sometimes be slow.
I think sometimes there are these big dramatic moments.
That's why we had these sermons from Parker the last two weeks.
But a lot of times it will take time for your life to be
transformed into the image of Jesus, but it won't ever stop.
The thing that God has placed in you will continue to build and
to grow until all of your life is leavened.
I also think it's worth noting here that this organic growth of
the Kingdom isn't because of something that you do.
Rather, especially in the ancient world, the bacteria that
leavens bred is kind of like a free gift.
It's just floating around in the air.
It's probably gross to some of you in this room.
There's bacteria and yeast floating around in the air.
That's even how you make sourdough starter today.
You can buy these old like 400 year old sourdough starters, but
all you really have to do is put some flour and water on the
counter, mix it together and give us some more flour over a
couple weeks and then you will have your own sourdough starter.
The yeast that's already floating through the air begins
to take hold and like a free gift, it will keep growing until
everything is leavened in the same way.
The thing that God has planted in you is not because you worked
really hard. It's a free gift that will
transform your whole life. Eventually your whole life will
be leavened. It seems like most of our work
there is. Then opening the jar and letting
the little bacteria in. Just as we close this morning,
there's one more detail of the parable that I want to draw our
attention towards, and I also don't think we notice when we're
reading it in translation. So the passage says that the
woman hid the leaven in three measures of flour until it was
all leavened. So a strange fact here is that 3
measures of flour is actually a really large amount of flour.
It's like 40 to 60 lbs. And so this extravagant amount
of flour, I think, points outward towards the way in which
the Kingdom of God is not only about what is going on in your
life. It's actually bigger in this
giant end of the work that is happening inside of us as God is
moving outwards. The parable ends with everything
being leavened. It's not this one little tiny,
small loaf of bread. It's this massive amount of
flour that would not even fit in a normal oven.
So that's also what the Kingdom of God is like.
The thing that Jesus has placed in you will work its way out to
transform your life. But as it works its way out in
your life, the thing that Jesus has placed in the world through
the church will also work its way out to transform the whole
world. What God begins in each one of
us, in you, and in you, and in you and in you, will come to
reform and reshape the entire world.
All 40 to 60 lbs of flour, not through control, not through
power or domination, but like yeast and bread working its way
through until everything looks more like the way God would have
the world to be. And so as we close, I'd like to
have the band to start coming back up the worship team.
And I think what I want to draw your attention to here, just at
the very end as we reflect on all of these parables of the
Kingdom of God, is God's patience.
So I think a lot of times we can get really worried about the
pace at which the world is changing or at which our own
life is changing. But the Kingdom of God is often
slow and unnoticed until suddenly there is this massive
rise. God moves in God's own timing
and with patient deliberation. It takes a long time to have doe
yeast worked through 60 lbs of flour, but it doesn't stop.
And God's movement in you and through you isn't stopping
either. Just as we conclude, I want to
put up this verse from Paul's letter to Philippians.
It says, I am confident of this, that the one who began a good
work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus
Christ, and we find ourselves watching for the signs of this
good work. I think there were a lot of
invitations to prayer in, in the sermon today, even as I, I don't
know that think about the the work of kneading the dough and
the different ways of looking at the truths inside of the story.
But the one thing that stood out when Thomas was at the part he
talked about like the Kingdom being inside of us, even when it
feels hidden, was the word belonging and the idea of of us
belonging in God's Kingdom, of us belonging and God's family.
And so I just wanted to say that word specifically.
And if, if that's a word that I don't know, feels hard or feels
Invitational, maybe especially today, I'd love to pray for you.
Yeah. I.
Think also just a couple more things that I think there's an
invitation towards prayer for those who don't feel God's
patience, really frustrated by that.
Or I also think I would encourage you to get prayer if
you feel like when you look back over your life, it feels like
not at all life giving. Maybe there's trauma or
something that has gotten mixed in that makes it hard to have
this big story of your life. I encourage you to get prayer
for that too, as we stand together.