Sermons

Of Seeds and Flour and Love and Hope

Jamie L. Kenyon	Third Presbyterian Church
July 27, 2008	Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33; 44-45

    
Some of my earliest years are filled with memories of yeast and flour. My grandparents were the owners and operators of a bakery, and with much skill and many long hours they created vast quantities of baked goods for their local community. I will forever have a vision of my grandfather’s lean, white-clothed figure making 10 or more pies at a time, spreading out dozens of cookie dough balls, cutting out raised donuts with a rolling pin fashioned just for the purpose, or shaping long loaves of bread as he readied them for the pans. On other occasions, he would stand at the 10-foot wooden counter that he used and, in what seemed like a moment’s time, would strew flour in cloudy puffs until the entire surface was covered with an even film. Then he’d reach into the mixer that was 2-3 times my small height and grab out a large wad of yeasty dough. Between the machine rollers and the hand rolling-pin he would iron the dough out into a length, perhaps 1 foot by 8 foot. And then the real fun would begin. He’d brush the dough with melted butter, and then add cinnamon sugar and, sometimes, raisins. Finally he would roll the entire length up like one, very long snake, pound the edges together with the heel of his hand, and then cut the strip into wheeled chunks, until he had a vast quantity of cinnamon rolls that he gracefully and systematically placed in a long line of greased pans. The only thing better than watching him work was eating the finished product—especially if it was warm and gooey from the oven.

But more important than this is my memory of him as a person: His warm, patient instruction as he taught me how to mix and knead bread, his impish grin when he would lob a small wad of dough at me or some other unsuspecting victim, his firm tenderness and love that was a staple for me, far more even than the floury creations I was privileged to eat. There is tremendous power in our interrelatedness as human beings, in the give and take, in the bickering and forgiving, in the capsules of trivia that we share and in the ingenious genuineness of love, spread generously across the yeasty dough of our lives.

How apt for us, then, that Matthew’s gospel offers, as one of its images for the reign of God, a measure of yeast, that when added to three measures of flour, leavens the entire mixture. Those of us so used to eating leavened bread don’t hear the irony or the twist that is part of this passage. In biblical times, it was unleavened bread that was considered holy because it was representative of the haste of the Israelites as they moved from slavery to freedom in Egypt. Leavened bread, then, would have been considered less clean, less holy because it was of the everyday and ordinary. It was coarser, in a way. And yet, here is Jesus, comparing the kingdom of heaven with leavened bread and not with unleavened bread. Could it be that he is attempting to teach people that the reign of God is not something completely set apart, but something that should be mixed in with the everyday ingredients of our lives, so that even the most ordinary and familiar become as flavorful and redolent as yeasty bread? Could it be that he was inviting people into the kingdom who cannot fit the precise definitions of holiness within sacred Jewish culture—people whose “yeastiness” as it were, placed them amongst the poor, the outcast, and the unclean? Perhaps he is even inviting us to consider that every word and deed that we offer up to one another somehow leavens our relationships and our community and so, if we are to live according to God’s reign, we must take care what it is we use as our own “leavening” agent.

We hear as well of mustard seeds, smallish and ranging from yellow to black in color. Here, too, there is a twist. Typically, the mustard plant is rather invasive species, and tends to take over the land in which it is planted. How likely then, would someone want to sow it in their fields, especially if all it would do would be to bring chaos into their otherwise orderly plantings? What might they think then, when Jesus transforms these insidiously invasive bushes into enormous trees? For when Jesus tells the tale, these small seeds seem to hold some kind of promise, some kind of blessing that would have sounded utterly astounding to biblical ears. Unlike other biblical prophets, he does not name the great cedars of Lebanon as the trees of the kingdom. Instead, he speaks of scrappy, unruly plants that are somehow fostered into enormous trees and that, in their maturity, attract flocks of birds to their branches. Perhaps, Jesus is inviting us to consider whether or not God comes to us in the painfully invasive and chaotic moments of our lives in order to transform that chaos into something more substantial, something more rooted and grounded, something more filled with life and hope and, therefore, more like the reign of God than we might ever imagine. For instance, the mustard plant is not only known for its chaotic and invasive nature, but also for its healing properties. In this way, it begins to morph and mutate into something akin to the tree of life, but one that comes from unexpected places and that grows in unexpected ways. So too, are we modern-day dwellers of God’s kingdom being formed in unexpected ways and offered the seeds of healing even when we are in the midst of the chaos and the troubles that sometimes beset us and invade our lives.

Then there are the remaining transactional images for the reign of God. In the first, a man finds a treasure hidden in a field. Rather than going back and stealing it by night, and rather than seeking to purchase the field only in order to satisfy his greed, the man goes with great joy and he legally procures the treasure that he so wants for himself. Similar to this is the man who is a dealer in pearls. But this man doesn’t simply happen onto the pearl as the other man did with the treasure in the field. Instead, he is an expert in his field and seeks diligently after a pearl of great value such that, when he finally finds it, he knows its tremendous worth and is willing to use all of his resources in order to procure it. Could Jesus be suggesting that there are treasures of great value that might be buried just underneath our feet? Could he be saying that this treasure that he describes as the reign of God is so amazing that, when we find it, we are filled with immeasurable joy? So much joy, in fact, that we are willing to go to great lengths to procure it. He may also be suggesting that sometimes, like the pearl merchant, we must use all our savvy, all our wisdom, and all of our experience in order to find that which is of ultimate worth. It is relatively easy to find average pearls, average, even if compelling, things upon which to squander our resources. But how often do we patiently and thoroughly sift through all the pearls that are set before us—especially in our consumerist world—in order to find that which is most valuable? How often do we settle, instead, for so much less than what truly can be ours?

Barbara Brown Taylor, whom some of you will recognize from our study of her book, Leaving Church, speaks of the power of parables like those in Matthew’s gospel when she says, “How can the language of earth capture the reality of heaven? How can words describe that which is beyond all words? How can human beings speak of God?" And yet, with ordinary words, and using ordinary things, Jesus offered profound messages about the extraordinariness of God’s way and God’s realm. And he expected that we, together in community, would somehow help each other “make the connections . . . [For] we cannot say what it is exactly, but we can say what it is like, and most of us get the message.” It is impossible for us to bring fully to light something that is party mystery and part grace. So there always seems to be a kind of hidden-ness about the reign of heaven. And yet, if we seek after this reign we may find it in the most ordinary and everyday parts of our lives. We may see the “signs of the kingdom of heaven, clues to all the holiness hidden in the dullness of our days . . . [for it is possible] that God decided to hide the kingdom of heaven not in any of the extraordinary places that treasure hunters would be sure to check but in the last place that any of us would think to look, namely, in the ordinary circumstances of our everyday lives.”

As I look back on it, there was something of the reign of heaven for me in the midst of all the flour and yeast, and flying dough balls of my grandparent’s bakery. And, there have been other holy and precious moments, treasures beyond price, that I have been privileged to experience as I’ve walked through the years since that time. I suspect, as you look at your own lives, similar extraordinarily ordinary times will jump out at you and speak to you of the reign of heaven. Some of the treasure of heaven is surely that love of which Paul speaks in his letter to the church in Rome, a love that mysteriously and amazingly continues, in spite of hardship and distress, in spite of—and sometimes because of—times when we are most exposed and vulnerable. For truly, it is my belief that the pearl of great price is already among us, the treasure hidden in the field is already hidden in our hearts, the yeasty dough is already set to rise in our souls, and the infiltrating healing properties of the mustard plant are at work to make us more whole.

This is our hope, this is our promise—that the kingdom—the reign of God—is already at work in our midst, even if it has not yet come in fullness; and we can no more be separated from the love of God than we can fly to the moon and back with our own wings. Over the last eleven months, I have been privileged to experience the reign of God in your midst: certainly in worship. But, more often than not, I have experienced it primarily in the conversations and visits I’ve had with you here at the church, in the hospital, and in your homes—right in the warp and weave of your and my everyday life. At times the preciousness of it has been as palpable to me as the spray of flour strewn across my grandfather’s worktable. And while I will be here for two more weeks yet, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the privilege of working with and beside you and I thank you for letting me into the holy moments of your own lives.

May you, in the days, and weeks ahead, recognize the yeasty smell of God’s kingdom in your own moment-to-moment existence. May you discover some treasure that you never knew existed hidden somewhere in the depths of your being. And may you know the full depth and breadth and length and height of God’s love—for it is in that love that we all hope and it is upon that hope that we all depend and upon which we build the very foundations of our lives. For where our treasure is, there will our heart be also—there is the seed, and the flour, and the love, and the hope.