The Kingdom of God | Parable of the Leaven

Today our teaching scripture is from Matthew chapter 13, verse

Matthew 13:33

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.