A Little Leaven

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.27.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13:31-33; 44-52

Perspective is everything.

How we see the world, and those around us?  It makes an amazing amount of difference.  Oh, sure, there’s a reality underlying everything we do.  But how we approach that reality shapes both ourselves and our reactions to it.

That’s been driven home over the last month, as I’ve engaged in conversations around the ongoing mess in Israel and Palestine.  And Lord have mercy, is it a mess.  It’s been a mess since before I was born, and it shows no signs of becoming any less impossible.

One of the things that is most maddening about the images of violence and suffering that rise up out of that wildly, impossibly complicated and intractable mess is that it feels so beyond reach.  Here there are blood hatreds and territorial complexities going back generations, a churning darkness that seems to have achieved a bizarre sort of critical mass.  It’s like that moment when a vast cloud of hydrogen has collapsed down, pressed in on itself by it’s own mass, until the energy of that mass ignites the fusion that begins a star.  It is like that, but with human souls.

The Middle East feels, at times, like a dark star of human suffering, as anguish begets violence, which begets more anguish.  I look at that dark star, radiating bitterness and pain, and I look out at our little fellowship.  If the task of preaching is to proclaim the Good News in a way that helps us all live that Good News out a little more, it’s so tempting just not to mention it at all.  What, really can we do here?  What can I do?  Preach a sermon?  Write a particularly pithy blog post?  No amount of playing with human language seems enough.  It is not here.  It exists on another scale.

That’s a frustration, but it’s not what I find most maddening about the scenes that play out over our collective media consciousness.

What’s most maddening about this problem is that it isn’t real.  Oh, it is, in the sense that human beings are really suffering and dying, and there’s the crack and thunder of bombs and rockets filling the skies over Galilee.  That has really been happening.

But it’s not real in the way that a storm is real, or that a tsunami is real.  It isn’t real in the way that a cancer cell is real, or Ebola is real.

As terrible as it is, as much as mothers weep over the bodies of their children, as much as the world wrings its hands in frustration at how seemingly impossible that old blood conflict is, it is a chosen thing.  Assuming the human beings who are part of this mess are still free, still moral agents, still capable of making decisions, it is as simple as everyone simply saying, “You know, I think I won’t choose to kill people today.”

There was a day like that, yesterday, and then again this morning, we hear the news.  We’ll just take a break, both sides said.  You can’t do that in the middle of a typhoon. “I’d like you to take a pause for humanitarian reasons,” you shout into the storm.  If it can stop, it’s a choice.  And I wondered, why not just run with that?  I mean, really.  How hard could it be just to not do something?

Because it’s a choice, the decision to create violence is question of perspective, of how we choose to filter and interpret our experience, as is so much of human brokenness.  We choose

An event, a death, a loss, or any action taken?  It is cast through a filter of perspective, an assumption that runs so deep that it flavors the whole experience of that event.   The more hardened your view of the world, the more likely it is to so critically compromise your view of things that you can’t even see the thing right in front of you.

That is a basic problem with our human subjectivity.  It can become a filter so thick that the reality of God’s work can’t get through.

And so we have Jesus, trying to describe the reality that he was proclaiming.  For the last two weeks, we’ve heard him pitch out two different stories, each of which he was using to illustrate the central theme of his teachings: the Kingdom of Heaven.

Within the three synoptic Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that theme is consistent and sustained.  It’s the primary focus of all of his parables and teaching.  It’s the reason he brings out all of these complicated forms of teaching about what it meant for the Creator of the Universe to have authority over the world.

It’s a complicated reality he’s attempting to articulate, and today, he comes at both us and his disciples with a great rush of images.  The Kingdom of Heaven is like, each of them begins, and then suddenly we’re looking at it through the framework of another image.  He forces us into perspectival shifts, looking at it one way, and then another, and then another.

It’s a mustard seed, tiny and yet the thing that begins a wild growth!  It’s a treasure, discovered hidden in a field, which someone rushes to buy in their excitement.  It’s a pearl, one so perfect and beautiful that a merchant would sell everything to have just that single thing.  It is like the net that the fishermen cast into the sea, one that returns brimming with fish to eat and to cast back.

And it is like yeast, or “leaven.”  Mix a little with flour, and the yeast makes the whole loaf rise.

That last one sticks with me, and not just because it evokes the impossibly delicious smell of baking bread and the promise of some remarkably lovely and flavorful carbs.

It sticks with me because, as a metaphor, yeast mixed in with flour occurs elsewhere in the Bible.  It’s an image used by Paul, as he talks about the way that sin weaves its way into us.  It is Paul’s image that we hear most often coming from the mouths of Christians.

“A little leaven ruins the whole loaf,” they say.

It is the same image, the same concept, the very same metaphor.  Only it is used, here, for an entirely different purpose.  Paul uses the image twice.  Once in Galatians 5:9, but there it’s a small fragment.  He uses it more pointedly when he talks to the proud, fractious, endlessly arguing Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 5:6, as he describes the impact of their pride on their faith.  Sure, you sort of get the idea, he says to the Corinthians, but you’ve let the bad seep through your whole being like yeast in bread.  It’s changed who you are.

The same metaphor, only now, describing our brokenness.

Paul’s intent in using it was to tell us to carefully sort through ourselves, in the knowledge that tolerating even the smallest bit of darkness in us risks corrupting us.  How much do we want in ourselves?  How much plutonium do we want in our morning coffee?  How much poop do we want in our smoothie?

But human beings have taken that, and turned it outward and away.  It becomes not about preparing ourselves for our participation in the Kingdom, but about turning against others.  You must be 100% doctrinally pure!  You must assent to everything that we say you must believe, or you can’t possibly be part of us!  Where do you stand in the third century debate between Arius and the Cappadocians?  Do you believe that the Bible is the one True and Inerrant Word of the Living God?  And when we saith the Bible, we meaneth the King James Version Only.  

If not, you’re ruining the whole thing.  You are the tiny seed of evil!  Evil!  Out you go.  

That fails to understand how Paul uses the metaphor, but it also seems to flip the Jesus-teaching on it’s head.  When Jesus describes leaven, he presents it as the way we should view the Kingdom among us and within us.  Here, this tiny thing, that changes who we are for the purposes of grace.

It is a seed, a hint of the future that lays before us, of the possibility that God might be working in us.

The challenge, of course, is seeing it that way, both in yourself and others.  If you work under the assumption that God’s work in you is ongoing, that it’s slowly transforming you, and you pour yourself into helping that happen by turning yourself towards it, that change happens.  It turns you, and heals you, slowly and surely.

More important still is seeing that Kingdom leaven at work in others.  Looking at a soul in that way changes your interaction with them.

And there, there lies something we can do, a way we can act when faced with those seemingly intractable challenges.  In our every interaction, our every engagement, both lighting up that part of the Kingdom in you, and assuming that it is shared with those you are engaged with.

Perspective, in matters of our integrity and our souls, is everything.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.