Meg Peery McLaughlin
Stories Jesus Told: The One about Yeast and Flour
February 2, 2025
Matthew 13: 33
Prayer of Illumination:
Tell us a story, Lord Jesus.
And hold us close when it rattles us with your truth.
Your Spirit is here and we are listening.
Amen.
Sermon:
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.”
My Epiphany star word this year was STORY
So the sermon series we start today is right up my alley.
This February we’ll be spending time with the Stories Jesus Told.
Jesus told stories using the ordinary and scenes from the natural world.
A colleague of mine liked to say Jesus told stories of
“seeds and weeds and surprisingly good Samaritans”.
And just like that line, sometimes we’re tempted to think that parables go down
smooth, like a good bedtime story—something we can cozy up with.
This one seems harmless. It’s only 22 words long.
And we can read it real easy like—
Turns out three measures of flour is like 50 pounds.
You’d have to ask a baker how much bread that would bake.
And it’s a good reminder—a little goes a long way;
and hey, thanks Jesus for having the main character be a woman this time.
But church, with these stories, Jesus is pointing toward the kingdom of heaven.
So, why would we think the stories will be tame?
Truth is parables intend to tease our minds and disrupt our norms,
thus it is not advisable to read these stories at night,
for they may well keep you awake tossing and turning through the night–
this one included.
When we hear of this woman in the kitchen leavening the flour, our minds might reach for that innocuous little yellow packet of Fleischmann’s,
but in the vast majority of it’s instances in scripture, yeast is a negative image.
“Beware of the yeast of the Sadducees and Pharisees,” Jesus tells his disciples.
“Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread,” Exodus instructs.
The Apostle Paul, in warning the Galatian church of a corrupt teaching, says
“A little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough,”
It’s like saying: “One rotten apple spoils the whole barrel.”
And this woman didn’t just mix in the yeast with all that flour,
though that’s what the words of your pew bible reads.
Here is where it is fun to read the text in the Greek.
The verb is actually enkrypsen. Does that sound like anything familiar?
Jesus is saying the woman encrypted the yeast into the flour.
She smuggles a dangerous substance into the flour,
a substance that will transform the whole batch.
The kingdom of God is like a stealthy act of sabotage. Say what?!?
Biblical Scholar Tom Long
in his new book Proclaiming the Parables
says that if the flour that the woman corrupts was pure and good,
then this corruption would be a travesty.
But if the flour is the world, and the world itself is corrupt,
well that is a whole other thing.
And we don’t have to look far to see how corrupt the world is, do we?
This world does NOT reflect the God’s dream for all people, that much is for sure.
So it would seem that the yeast smuggled in is, like the kingdom itself,
corrupting the corruption of the world,
until the whole world is leavened with the love of God.
The woman is corrupting the corruption of the world.
This week was not a healthy one in the McLaughlin household.
I was the only one standing as Norovirus ripped its way through.
Recovery included gatorade and Lysol and Zofran and saltines and . . . .
Star Wars movies.
And it turns out, when the national news is making your blood boil,
watching little, furry, round Ewoks take down the death star is helpful.
It’s a reminder of how resistance to evil works—
with the tools you have in front of you and the creatures you have around you
small moves can make a big impact.
Corrupting the corruption of the world.
Think Harriet Tubman. She who wrote encrypted letters to the enslaved
and sang stealthy songs like Follow the Drinking Gourd,
and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
guiding folks along the underground railroad to freedom.
To this day, some of the old-timers along the Chesapeake Bay say that Harriet Tubman
was corrupt.
That she was “thief who stole other people’s property.”
But what was she doing but smuggling some dangerous yeast
into a huge load of flour, the flour of oppression,
confident of the day when all would be leavened.
Corrupting the corruption of the world.
Yes, this parable is the story we need today.
At least it’s the one I need.
But church, I want us to notice something before we charge out there.
Something I did NOT notice until this week.
I confess to you that I picked this parable for this week because we are having
communion today. Perfect fit, I thought.
Woman mixing yeast and flour.
Big ole’ loaf of bread leavened on the table.
But in these 22 words, bread never shows up. Did you notice that? I didn’t.
This story that Jesus tells does not get tied up.
There is no bow at the end.
There is no happily ever after. Not yet.
And if I understand the text, the end is not ours to write and the bow is not ours to tie.
Let me tell you why I think this:
Our parable today, the one about the yeast and the flour
shows up right after another, longer parable that Jesus tells:
the one about the weeds and wheat.
That one goes that someone sows good wheat in a field
and at night, an enemy comes and
sows weeds right there in the midst of that good crop,
so when the plants come up, they’re all mixed up together.
The good and the bad together.
But the householder says we can’t rip the weeds out,
or else we’d uproot the good wheat along with it,
so we must let them, let them grow together,
until the harvest, when the reapers will sort it out.
Later, Jesus explains it to his friends
saying that the sorting is up to God, not us.
It’s like Jesus can hear us begging:
Please, Lord, we’re dying to charge out there right now
and pluck up every single daggum weed ourselves,
because we can see this world is threatened with evil weeds,
scary weeds, bonkers-level weeds. And we want to burn it all down.
Let us rid this place of meanness. Let us right this world of madness.
It’s like he can hear our volume rise and rise and rise.
A newish member David Kimball recently reacquainted me with a card game
that I learned as a child. It’s called Pit.
I love it (and also I don’t recommend it if you are sensitive to noise).
The point of the game is to corner the market with a certain commodity.
You get dealt a mixed hand of wheat and corn and barley or whatever,
and loudly try to trade your cards with others at the table until you have all wheat,
or all corn, etc. And there is a bear card somewhere in the mix,
which is like an evil card that if you have it at the end you lose.
The parable of the weeds and the wheat is telling us that
until God makes it right
the bear card is out there
until God makes it right
we’re all gonna have a mixed hand.
We cannot fix it all.
Yes, God is god. And yes God is good. And I am confident of this:
Ultimately the harvest will come in.
That’s why we sing that song each week:
Goodness is stronger than evil
Love is stronger than hate.
Light is stronger than darkness
Life is stronger than death
Victory is ours, victory is our through God who loves us.
But the victory, church, is through God,
not by dent of our own efforts.
God will do the harvesting,
and indeed everyone will be fed. Everyone.
So if that parable –the one about the weeds and wheat
– is telling us what God is doing—
I think this parable—the one about the yeast and flour –
is telling us what is ours to do.
And boy is it hard right now to know what’s ours to do right now.
Because we are overwhelmed and horrified and deeply, deeply sad.
But, church, take courage.
Christ gives us this story. Thank God for this story.
God gives us a way to participate in the victorious work of God.
My preacher friend MaryAnn wrote this week:
The ultimate outcome is out of our hands. It always has been.
So… what’s the point of trying to do the right thing?
What’s the point of caring about things like integrity, service,
collaboration, and kindness?
The right thing is the point.
It’s what the very kingdom of heaven looks like.
So, deep breaths.
Mix in the yeast, church.
Corrupt the corruption of the world around you.
Be about the stealthy work of hope.
Sabotage any and every meanness.
Encrypt this world with risky radical love everywhere you go.
Keep pointing to the harvest you know is coming
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.