First Friends Meeting
Matthew 13:33-35
‘The Leaven in the Dough’
Doug Gwyn

When I was a Friends pastor in Berkeley, California, I lived just across the Bay from San Francisco, home of sourdough bread. What passes for sourdough bread around the rest of the country is pretty bland compared to what they make around San Francisco. Some of it is pretty sour! I gained a taste for it while I lived there. Some local brands there still work with a sourdough culture that goes all the way back to the Gold Rush of 1849. That’s when gold miners first developed it. They came up with it in the ancient and traditional way. It’s not like buying a packet of pure yeast at the grocery. You expose bread or raw dough to the air and see what develops. All kinds of spores are always flying around – yeast, mold, mildew, bacteria. The sourdough culture developed by chance, really. I can just imagine the original miners back then. “Tex, you still making that weird sour dough? I’ve been thinkin’ maybe that stuff ‘aint so bad after all. What I’ve been making tastes like dirty socks.”

So once that culture was started, it has been isolated and purified, and passed on from generation to generation. What started out at random (exposing dough to the open air) became isolated and intentional (passing on a specific culture, or ‘start’ for sourdough bread). What began as exposing dough to contagion and corruption (things blowing around in the air) became a matter of culture, perfection, even purity. Now, there are differences of opinion around the Bay Area, who has the best sourdough, the most authentic sourdough, the original sourdough. It can become almost sectarian at times.

It’s not unlike the Church, really. We’re working with a start that’s 2000 years old now. There was something blowing around in the air back then. It landed on the apostles one day in Jerusalem. It wasn’t sour, it was fiery – it really lit them up. It looked like corruption to some standing by. They said, hey, it’s not even noon yet and these folks are drunk. But Peter stood up and explained to the onlookers that they weren’t drunk – the Spirit of Christ had fallen on them. Each of them took some of that start and began spreading it out from there, and it really took off. To some, it still looked like contagion, corruption. Saul tried to stamp it out, until he confronted Jesus on the road to Damascus. He gained a taste for this new culture. He became its greatest salesman. He was very infectious. He became the contagion of the very thing he had thought was corruption.

For three hundred years, the Roman Empire tried to stamp out this contagion. Until the Emperor, Constantine got a taste of it and decided it’s really very good, actually. Of course, that breakthrough had its drawbacks. Because then the Roman Empire tried to put a monopoly on Christianity. One brand only, sold through one franchise only. Everything that wasn’t Empire-brand Christianity was denounced, even persecuted as corrupt, contagious, wrong.

Fortunately, Christians don’t spend all their time inside the Church. We get out, we get exposed to the air. Lots of things can blow over us, start growing among us, and they are not all good, by any means. And some things are good in their way, but not necessarily Christian. Today, we are fortunate to live in a free, democratic society. With free speech and a free press, we are exposed to many things. There are truly harmful influences that we continue disinfecting ourselves from. But generally, we allow a variety of cultures to grow, including religious cultures. Fresh winds of the Spirit keep blowing across our landscape. In a diverse, multicultural society we all benefit from the variety of cultures that flourish here. And we know that the intermingling and cross-fertilization of those cultures produces good things. Yet at the same time, we know that each culture needs to tend its own strain, perfect its own formula, like the sourdough culture of San Francisco. There’s always going to be a tension and an interplay between allowing freedom and randomness on one hand, and being intentional, focused, pure on the other. Whether were talking about bread or religion.

At First Friends we often give a new attender a loaf of bread as a way of welcome. Actually, the Sunday we bake and bring a loaf of bread usually turns out to be a Sunday when that new attender can’t be here. So, if you’ve been attending for a while and haven’t received a loaf of bread, sorry! Please keep coming – we’ll get in synch with you yet! But I’ve been thinking this week that the loaf of bread is a symbol – it’s a welcome to our little subculture of the Spirit. We hope that it tastes good to you. We hope that what tastes like the yeast of the Spirit to us doesn’t taste like mold to you.

Barbara read for us the parable Jesus told of the yeast, or leaven, in the dough. A parable is a brief story, and this one is about as brief as a story can be. It’s one verse long. Jesus says, “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.” Period, end of story. That’s what the kingdom of heaven is like. He could have added that she went on and baked the dough, that it made wonderful, delicious bread, that she served it at a party and everyone just loved it. He could have built this story up a lot more. But no – Jesus just wants to compare the kingdom of heaven, God moving and working among us, to the way leaven permeates and rises in flour.

One thing that New Testament interpreters notice is that, generally in Jewish and pagan literature of that day, “leaven” is almost always a negative term. It means corruption, contagion, rot. Leaven is what grows on bread when it is exposed to the air, to any old thing that floats by. Even Jesus, the one other time he speaks of leaven, uses it negatively. He warns his disciples to beware the leaven – that is, the teaching – of the Pharisees and Saducees (Matt. 16:6). Paul also uses “leaven” negatively. He’s concerned that the Galatians are starting to follow bad advice. He warns, “A little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough” (Gal. 5:9). Of course in the ancient world, they didn’t have microscopes. They didn’t know what leaven was, it was just something spiritual, something in the air. It might do good or it might do harm.

So in telling this very short little story, Jesus leaves us with some dissonance. That dissonance fit with a lot of things Jesus said and did. There was something in the air around Jesus. Some thought his teachings were dangerous. Some thought he was healing people by using demonic powers. Some thought he was an agent of corruption, a contagion that must be stopped, a danger to religious purity.

Quakers began 350 years ago surrounded by the same kind of controversy. The Puritan clergy of that day certainly thought they were a dangerous contagion to be stopped. But something was blowing across those Yorkshire dales around 1652 that infected and enflamed those early Friends much as those first disciples had been in Jerusalem 1600 years before. Was it the ‘original’, the ‘authentic’, the ‘true’ Christian faith of the apostles breaking out all over again? Early Friends thought so. Today, we wouldn’t claim to be the only true Church, as they did then. In those days, everybody claimed to be the only true Church – I guess that was something in the air then, too. But today I think we can still witness that there’s something authentic and true in our Quaker-Christian strain, this little ‘start’ we keep alive all these years later. Our culture may not be a wildly popular one, but it’s a good one. Sourdough bread isn’t going to become the most popular bread, but I’m glad some make it.

There’s always a lot blowing in the air around us, in our individual lives at school, at work, in our neighborhood. And in our life as a Friends Meeting. We’re not always sure what we’re dealing with. Each of us has to taste and test what’s blowing around us – is it the kingdom of heaven, God at work in our lives? Or is it some kind of rot? Should we accept openly gay and lesbian members? Some see the taint of moral corruption. Others say that this acceptance is a healthy awareness that there’s more than one way of being a fulfilled, faithful human being.

I’m still trying to decide whether to get a cell phone. It would definitely be handy at times. Someone might need to reach me urgently. On the other hand, would I just become one of those people that talks and drives, with no interior dialogue, who doesn’t take time to focus, to meditate, to pray? Smells like rot to me! What are the things blowing around you in your life? What are you tasting and testing? What do you need to throw out? What do you need to keep and nurture? Let’s spend some time in open worship with these questions.