Mark 2.13-17
Jesus went out again beside the sea; the whole crowd
gathered around him, and he taught them. 14 As he was walking
along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to
him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him. 15 And as he sat at
dinner in Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with
Jesus and his disciples-- for there were many who followed him. 16 When the scribes
of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they
said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and
sinners?" 17 When Jesus heard
this, he said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician,
but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but
sinners."
Matthew 16.6
Jesus said to them,
"Watch out, and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees."
Matthew 13.33
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."34 Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables;
without a parable he told them nothing. 35 This was to
fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet: "I will open my mouth to
speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of
the world."
Listen to the sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/why-this-church-the-kingdom-of-heaven-is-like-a-virus
Listen to the sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/why-this-church-the-kingdom-of-heaven-is-like-a-virus
One of the most distinctive things about Jesus was that he
taught using parables.
Not many
other teachers in the ancient world did this, and not many do it today.
But, time after time, Jesus told short stories that packed a
punch.
Certainly, Jesus wasn’t the first person to teach using
parables and stories,
there are
both Greek and Semitic examples from before his time.
But there is no evidence of anyone prior to Jesus
using
parables as consistently, creatively, and effectively as he did.
One of P.G. Wodehouse’s characters says:
"A parable is one of those stories in the Bible which sounds
at first like a pleasant yarn but keeps something up its sleeve which pops up
and leaves you flat."
Some of you may have heard the slightly clichéd definition
of a parable
that it is
“an earthly story with a heavenly meaning”
And certainly when I was a child growing up in church
the
parables, well, some of the them at least
were
presented to us as stories suitable for children.
These days, I have to say, I’m not so sure
I think
the parables aren’t nearly as warm and fuzzy
as they
are sometimes portrayed as being
Rather than being short and simplistic stories,
with two
levels of meaning – one earthly and one heavenly,
parables are actually much more complicated,
and Jesus’
parables are both works of art
and also
weapons he used in the conflict with his opponents,
The parables that Jesus told were always an invitation to
see the world differently,
and they
had the effect of polarising those who heard them;
either you entered into the new world that the parable
created, or you didn’t.
If you did, you found yourself living the new reality of the
kingdom of heaven, w
here love
overcomes evil,
where the
least and the last find themselves valued as never before,
and where
peace defeats violence.
But if you didn’t, you found yourself trapped in a world
where
power is allied to status and outworks as oppression,
and your
heart is hardened as you get drawn ever further
into the
destructive patterns of living that this world demands.
These are not merely stories to enjoy
rather
they hold up one reality to serve as a mirror of another
the world
of the story reveals the world of the Kingdom of heaven.
Parables are avenues to understanding,
they are
handles by which one can grasp the kingdom.
Jesus told parables to confront people
with the
character of God’s kingdom,
and to invite them to participate in it
and to
live in accordance with it.
Last month, when our communion series
had us
looking at the parable of the mustard seed,
I issued a challenge to see write a parable,
taking
something from the world around
and using
it shed light on some aspect of the Kingdom of heaven.
Thank you to those who took shared your parables with me,
and I
thought I’d take a moment now
for us all
to hear some of these Bloomsbury Parables.
The kingdom of heaven is like a strand of DNA, so tiny only
electron microscopes can see it. But it gives shape to all the glories of
nature: from the eye to the brain, from the rose to the mighty oak.
The kingdom of heaven is like a beautiful birthday cake,
which can only bring its true joy once it has been broken into pieces.
The kingdom of heaven is like a light, it is hope that
shines in the darkness.
The kingdom of heaven is like the transistor which lies at
the heart of all modern electronic devices.
The kingdom of heaven is like swimming a mile: the only way
to do it is one length at a time.
The kingdom of heaven is like the New Year’s Eve feast
prepared by my non-Christian friend for her elderly, lonely, and difficult
neighbours.
The kingdom of heaven is like a rainbow, reminding us of the
eternal promises of God.
The kingdom of heaven is like a picnic: once the food is
dispersed, a happy satisfied group of people remain.
The kingdom of heaven is like the electron: a tiny, tiny
particle buffeted about in all matter. But it bears a charge and as it joins
with other electrons it imparts terrific power that can do so much.
The kingdom of heaven is like this. A theatre was putting on
a wonderful production; everyone would enjoy it, and the standing ovation would
be rapturous. Some people heard about the production early, and quickly bought
their seats in the stalls. Some people could not afford the best seats, and
instead bought cheap seats on benches up in the gods. Some people left it until
the last minute and bought reduced price tickets at the door.
When the performance was due to start, the stalls were not
full. So those with cheap seats were moved down to the stalls alongside the
rich and the cultured.
The show was magnificent, but those who had bought their
tickets early tutted and spent the performance composing in their heads letters
of complaint to the management about how unfair it all was.
And so today we come to the parable of the yeast or leaven,
and I
wonder what challenge we will hear
in this
short and subversive story.
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.
As is always the case when we come to the Bible,
it’s worth
paying attention to the cultural background to what we read there.
Whilst human nature hasn’t changed,
the world
in which we live is very different from the world of the first century,
and we need to be alert to the error
of
thinking that things that are obvious to us were as obvious back then,
and indeed
vice versa.
The first thing we need to tease out here
is the
difference between yeast and leaven.
I don’t know if you’ve ever baked bread at home,
but if you
have, you’ve probably bought those little packets of dried yeast,
which is
activated by moisture as you knead it into the dough.
Because we have microscopes and science,
we know
that yeast are single celled microorganisms
that are
classified along with moulds and mushrooms as part of the fungi family.
And we know that it causes the bread to rise
by
converting the fermentable sugars present in the dough
into
carbon dioxide and ethanol.
It won’t surprise you to know that those living
in the
ancient near east of the first century didn’t know all this.
They just knew that if they took a lump of dough from the
last batch
and added
it to the new one,
it would
cause the dough to rise when it was baked.
This lump of dough was known as the ‘leaven’,
and it was
more similar to a modern friendship or Herman cake,
where you
pass on a portion of the uncooked dough to a friend,
that they
then use to activate their cake, before passing it on again.
So the ancient Greek word for yeast was the same as the word
for leaven,
and it refers
to this lump of fermenting dough,
that keeps
the process going from one batch of baking to the next.
The next thing we need to realise is that
in the
Jewish culture of the time of Jesus,
leaven is
not always a positive image.
The origin of this negativity towards leavened bread
comes from
some regulations in the Hebrew Bible
regarding the preparation for the Passover meal,
which
required that people ate only unleavened bread for a week.
(Leviticus
23.5-8)
The idea was that when the Pharaoh freed the Israelites from
slavery in Egypt,
it was
believed that they left in such a hurry
that they could not wait for their
bread dough to rise
and that in commemoration of this, for the duration of
Passover
no
leavened bread was eaten.
Symbolically speaking, then,
whilst
leavened bread certainly tastes nicer than unleavened bread,
it also came to symbolise being overly settled, too much at
ease in the world,
and being
unready to drop everything and follow the call of God.
As we saw in our first reading,
Jesus also
uses the image of leaven negatively
when he is
talking about the Scribes and the Pharisees,
and the point he is making is that they speak words which
sound very attractive
but which
are actually working against the kingdom that Jesus is proclaiming.
The thing is, whilst they might not have understood the
microbiology,
the
ancient people of Jesus’ time knew that yeast was an infection.
You only needed a small amount of it,
for it to
quickly spread through the whole batch of dough.
And once the dough has been leavened,
there’s no
going back.
You can’t get unleavened bread from leavened dough.
So whilst it might be fine to add yeast to your dough to
make it taste nice,
the
dangers of becoming too settled to follow God’s call,
or of
being infected with a virulent ideology,
are also there in the background to Jesus’s parable.
I don’t think this is a ‘nice’ parable.
It’s one
of those which packs a punch,
and is
designed to shock.
And I wonder if one way of getting our heads around this,
is to play
with a few more parables
that might
illuminate what Jesus is trying to do here.
See how you get on with these:
The kingdom of heaven is like a virus,
which spreads
throughout the body and against which even antivirals don’t work.
The kingdom of heaven is like compound interest,
which seems to make millionaires out of thin air.
The kingdom of heaven is like rust, which can eat away even
the strongest iron.
In other words, like leaven in dough,
the
kingdom of heaven is unstoppable,
it
increases exponentially,
and it
fundamentally changes the nature of everything it encounters.
I think that if you had asked the Scribes and the Pharisees
to come up
with a parable of the Kingdom,
using the
imagery of leavened and unleavened bread,
they would have told you that Kingdom of Heaven
is like
un-leavened bread.
Bread infected by yeast might be fine for everyday eating,
but it’s
profane, it’s commonplace,
it is,
quite literally, not kosher.
And if you want to be holy, like at Passover,
you leave
the leaven out.
This is because adding leaven changes things,
it alters
them, it messes them up,
and the Scribes and the Pharisees would have been the first
to say
that the
path to holiness is found in taking things back to basics,
leave out the leaven, discard the infection,
get back to purity and holiness.
I have a suspicion that they might have added,
‘Make
Israel great again’.
So when Jesus comes along, saying the Kingdom of Heaven is
like
a woman
who kneads leaven through the flour
until
there is enough risen bread to feed a village,
is a deeply subversive image.
Because Jesus is saying, to those who have ears to hear,
that the
Kingdom is found in things that are everyday,
in things
that are unholy, in things that are profane.
Whist the Scribes and the Pharisees got upset
about
Jesus taking a meal with tax collectors and sinners,
this parable is about the kingdom embracing everyone
the
unholy, the unworthy, and the unexpected.
The Scribes and the Pharisees would have said
that Jesus
was infecting the holy community
as leaven infected bread,
but Jesus said that their ideology of purity and exclusion
was the
real infection,
and that the mixing in of the outcast and the sinner
was what
made the kingdom come to life.
Jesus’ parable is about bringing the margins to the centre
it’s about
taking those whom the Scribes and Pharisees would cast aside
and instead mixing them in,
transforming both them and the kingdom in the process.
For yeast to be successful it has to be kneaded into batch,
it has to spread throughout to infect the
bread,
to
transform it into something else.
And there is a real challenge here for all those of us
who
already find ourselves on the inside, so to speak, of the Kingdom of Heaven.
How can we avoid becoming like the Scribes and the
Pharisees,
mentally
excluding those who we think will mess up our holiness and purity?
If I think back a couple of weeks,
to the
angry Christians standing beside the Pride Parade,
telling
people that they are going to go to Hell because of their sexuality,
I become ever more convinced that those of us who go and
stand in front of them,
offering
messages of love and acceptance and welcome
to people
who have been excluded from church after church,
are closer
to the kingdom than some might think.
But we still need to guard ourselves.
This is why our monthly series this year on inclusion,
building
on our registration as an Inclusive Church congregation,
invites us to consider not just sexuality,
but also
gender, disability, poverty,
mental health, and ethnicity,
as markers of exclusion that we need to be alert to.
We must never become complacent
in our
assumption that we are already embodying the kingdom,
because that way lies the leaven of the Scribes and the
Pharisees.
Rather, we need to remember that yeast is an agitator,
it mixes
things up,
and in Jesus’ parable it thrusts the holy and the profane
together,
because in
that mixture is found the Kingdom of God.
And like the leaven, Jesus was an agitator.
Nothing
and no-one touched by Jesus remained the same,
his ministry was one of radical transformation,
and of
finding the holy in the most unexpected of places.
This parable asks us to look for the kingdom in surprising
places,
to seek
the kingdom in the mundane,
to search
for the kingdom even where we would never expect to find it,
even, dare
I say it, in those places we would consider unholy.
And we see this time and again the ministry of Jesus,
as he
called people to follow him who you wouldn’t expect.
And he didn’t expect them to follow from the margins,
he didn’t
say, ‘you’re welcome this far, but no further’.
Rather, the unholy became his inner circle.
Churches can run the risk of becoming the kinds of places
that know
what is holy and good,
and then because we are open and inclusive,
we are
kind and allow people to come in and join us,
even
people who don’t fit our understanding of what a good Christian looks like.
But do we allow them to become a part of us, to integrate,
to mix in,
to leaven us, to transform us into something
different?
The risk is that we might not be quite as obviously holy as
we were before,
but then
we might find that we end up
looking a
lot more like the kingdom of God.
But the bread that needs the leaven is not just our church
communities:
What if we
think of ourselves, individually, as the bread?
What if we
allow ourselves to become infected?
What if we
invite the virus of the Kingdom into our lives?
This is a tough challenge,
because I
don’t know about you,
but as a Christian of many years,
I’ve heard
a lot of sermons telling me to keep myself pure and holy;
I’ve put a
lot of effort into learning to resist sin,
and in
repenting when I fail,
Many of us will have been conditioned to expect
that our
lives, if we live them rightly, will be analogous
to the unleavened bread of the Passover,
that with
enough prayer and holiness,
we can be ‘pure and free from sin’s alloy’,
as the old Christmas carol puts it.[1]
But that way, of course, lies the path of the Scribes and
the Pharisees,
who
invested so much in ensuring
that their lives were pure and holy
in ways
that the lives of others weren’t.
And here we just need to be honest about our sin,
and we
need to stop kidding ourselves
that any
of us have, or ever can,
attain purity or holiness by our own efforts.
Because once we have acknowledged this,
we are
ready to receive the infection of the Kingdom of Heaven,
which
takes all our aspirations, and all our dreams, and messes with them,
taking us into places we never thought we would go,
and
transforming us irrevocably in the process.
Now don’t hear me wrong here. I’m not saying that sin
doesn’t matter.
We all
know that there are infections which are destructive.
We can become infected with bad teaching, or destructive
theology,
we can
become infected with gossip and hatred,
and these things destroy individuals and communities.
But there are infections that change us for good,
like the
viruses used to deliver the cancer treatment.
We need to learn to recognise and resist the leaven of the
Scribes and the Pharisees,
who would
cast out all those unworthy of the kingdom,
and to welcome the infective yeast of the outcast and the
sinner,
who infect
us for good.
We need to look for in the kingdom is the good yeast
that makes
itself known in unexpected places.
And then we can be part of spreading the contagion.
This is
the glory of the Kingdom: it spreads in us, and through us.
In a moment we will be sharing communion,
in memory
of the Passover meal that Jesus ate with his disciples
on the
night before he was crucified.
And the bread we share will be leavened,
and we
will pass it one to another.
We do not keep the kingdom to ourselves,
we pass it
on, and we take it with us,
and in doing so we recognise that no one is more important
than any other,
and that
at the table of Christ, everyone is welcome.
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