We Can Do A Lot With A Little

Matthew 16:5–12 NRSV

When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. Jesus said to them, “Watch out, and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” They said to one another, “It is because we have brought no bread.” And becoming aware of it, Jesus said, “You of little faith, why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive? Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread? Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees!” Then they understood that he had not told them to beware of the yeast of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Yeast is an amazing thing.

It occurs naturally in the world. They are living micro-organisms, tiny little buggers who eat and reproduce and cause all kinds of cool and helpful chemical reactions that help break down waste and make nutrients available for soil or food.

Yeast is an amazing thing.

I’ve found myself fascinated by things produced by yeast for much of my adult life.

Of course, there was the rise, “pun intended,” of sourdough baking during the early days of the COVID-19 shutdown. Anyone else pick up bread-making back then?

I’m currently trying to keep another sourdough starter alive at home, thanks to Tracy, and have hopes of restarting my own bread making endeavors.

But things like bread, pizza dough, crackers, waffles…they need the yeast. Yeast helps the dough to rise, the flavor to develop, the aroma to grow more complex.

Before I go on, I have to acknowledge that I’m trying to talk about something scientific, a natural process that has chemical and molecular interactions which produce a byproduct which is good. That’s about the extent of my scientific knowledge and I don’t claim to be any more of an expert than that.

But what I do know is that yeast produces. It grows.

My first real foray into yeast and all it’s wonders was back in college. When I had come of age, a buddy and I began to experiment with brewing our own beer. This friend happens to be a biochemist, so he was incredibly knowledgable about how the science works. I, on the other hand, am a man of the humanities…so I helped with quality control.

We actually made some pretty good beer for a couple of college students. But homebrewing aside, what I learned about yeast in that process is this:

Yeast, this little naturally occuring micro-organism, thrives by eating sugars. To make a fermented beverage or food, you need adequate sugar content in the mix for the yeast to eat. In the case of alcohol, the metabolic process of the yeast yields a byproduct, ethanol. The yeast eats the sugars from the grains that are steeped in the brew process, a sugary sweet mixture.

I’ve messed around with a number of other fermentation processes. A few years ago, I took an old ceramic crock from my grandparents and attempted to make sauerkraut. In the case of sauerkraut, the naturally occuring yeast, which is in the air and on the vegetable in the dirt, interacts and begins fermenting by crushing and releasing the sugars from within the pieces of the cabbage. You cut up the cabbage, leech out the sugars by pounding it, and then soak it in a water bath, enclosed in the crock outdoors for a week or two. If you do it right — tasty, tangy saurkraut. If you do it wrong, it looks like the moldy crock I came home to from our sabbatical last summer…oops.

Fermentation and yeast are super important in medicine and food. As a species, we’ve learned to use these naturally occurring micro-organisms to create amazing recipes and medical interventions that help people.

And people of the ancient world understood this phenomenon. They understood the importance of yeast.

Here we have this interaction with Jesus and his disciples. They’re discussing a previous interaction with the religious leaders of the synagogue, the Pharisees and Sadducees, who had tried to test Jesus. They’d asked him to show them a sign from the heavens. Instead, Jesus turns it around on them and begins to tell of all these naturally occuring signs and wonders in the natural world. The changing of the sky as the day ends. The hope of dawn’s new light. Signs of God’s presence and signs of the times. But the people cannot see.

The disciples forgot to bring bread…so Jesus uses this as another opportunity to teach. Of course, he’s speaking metaphorically about the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees, but what might that metaphor mean?

Again, drawing from my limited experience and deep fascination with yeasty things…it’s advised that when you’re actively fermenting something with yeast, be it sourdough starter or a carboy full of aging beer, you have to be careful to not cross contaminate your yeast with other strains. It’s advised, for instance, that you not store your sourdough starter near other active ingredients or yeasts, because they can intermingle and disrupt the balance of the sourdough yeast. The same goes for beer — certain strains of yeast produce particular flavors. A belgian yeast will produce different fruity esters in it’s fermentation process, which differ from the flavors that are developed using an american yeast. It’s important to keep these separate because with cross-contamination, they can ruin the batch.

Jesus wants the disciples to see this truth: faith is like yeast. When we have faith, we are able to see things multiply and come to be what they are meant to be through God’s hand. We trust the process. We don’t worry when things aren’t quite done, because we trust God is at work.

And what’s at play here is: Who are we putting our faith in?

Jesus is warning his followers to not be swayed by the yeast and teachings of the Pharisees and Sadducees. It’s known by now that these leaders are trying to undermine and disrupt Jesus’ ministry. They are rouge yeast, trying to infiltrate and disturb the natural growth of the Jesus movement. They seek to pitch a different kind of piety, a different kind of yeast, and perhaps offer the disciples a bread of a different kind.

Of course, this isn’t about bread, as the disciples understand plainly. This is about faith. Who do you put your faith in? The religious elites who seek to destroy this movement of love? The ones who collude with the empire? Their yeast may be powerful, but what does it yield?

I wonder if Jesus would have used the image of yeast if he were to teach this to us today.

Actually, I think there’s a more apt metaphor that, unfortunately, I’ve been thinking about a lot this last month. As we hear Jesus warn the disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, which will grow and disrupt their bread…I also hear Jesus saying: Beware of the cancer of the religious elites.

Again, I’m not a science guy, but I find it pretty easy to jump between the ways yeast works wonders in the natural world and the nature of cancer in how it spreads and destroys the body.

Beware of the cancer of the religious establishment. Beware of the wolves in sheeps clothing. Beware of the cancer that will rob you of your soul and leave you with nothing.

As you know, my wife is facing a recurrence of breast cancer, now metastatic in her spine, pelvis, and femur. The cancer that 15 years ago we had thought was contained has now spread. The cancer, like yeast, has found something new to eat and thrive upon. In Stacy’s case, it’s hungry for estrogen. Some cancers are more aggressive, some are more slow growing. It depends on the type and the tissues that it lives in. But cancer, like yeast, spreads and grows. Beware of the cancer of the Pharisees.

And sadly, we have plenty of modern examples of this threat. Our nation faces the rise of a collusion between the church and government, the rise of Christian Nationalism, which itself is a cancer that eats at the soul of our family of faith. Christian Nationalism is a cancerous pairing of autocratic and theocratic rule, where prayer and religious language get muddled with empire building and injustice. Christian Nationalism is a cancer that breeds in self-centered ideologies that look out for what’s best for me, at the expense of the poor and the refugee.

Beware of the yeast.

Beware of the cancer.

I think Jesus would have been quick to use cancer as his go-to image here, especially when it comes to the inner workings of the soul and the human spirit.

Yeast, in the wrong setting, can disrupt and delay our healthy growth. Yeast, for example, in a wound, is not a good thing.

Cancer, by the same measure, disrupts natural cell processes and can through the whole body out of whack and threaten long-term health.

Beware of the cancer that will eat at your sould. Beware of the yeast that may rise in you, but produce the wrong kind of bread. Beware of the mold and fungus that grows where it does not belong.

I have hope for us and find it in this text.

But again, we must beware. Whose yeast are you feeding on?

I think about this passage and what kinds of inputs and influences I have in my life. Where do I get my news from, for instance? Is the yeast produced by that source helping our world thrive, or is it adding to the cancer of things? Who do I listen to for wisdom or perspective? Are they causing healthy yeast to thrive in me, or are they producing a cancerous shell of humanity with the ideas they espouse?

With cancer, treatment is required. Radiation, drugs, chemo, all to disrupt the disruption of the cancer.

With yeast, we have to keep ourselves pure, putting our faith not in the ones who would distract us with riddles and power grabs, but faith in the one who makes bread from nothing, performs miracles with the natural order, shows us signs that point to God’s providence.

What yeast are you filled with?

The hope here is that we can put our faith in the one who will produce a healthy yield from the yeast of faith. Yeast perfects, develops, provides flavor and complexity. It makes more from what it has.

I’ve picked this and other texts to preach from this summer that look at how we steward our resources and use what we have. In the case of yeast, it is a remarkable little organism that can do immense transformation work. Yeast, in it’s very small form, can change the chemical structure and makeup of a huge amount of dough or beer.

So what yeast are we cultivating here?

How are we tending to the yeast we have, helping it grow and flourish?

We are in a time when we need to really focus on these questions. How do we do what we need to do with the little we have? Do we believe that just a little yeast could produce immense change and growth in us?

I know we know the threat of cancer, how it can destroy the body. We have a wide range of experiences with this reality in our congregation: breast cancer, bone cancer, blood cancer, prostate cancer, brain cancer…sadly, I could keep going.

As we look out upon our world, which sadly is sick with the cancer of Christian Nationalism and cult-like allegiances to the agents of it’s spreading…we must find a different way.

Our world needs Christians, like you and me, to keep cultivating the yeast of Jesus in our hearts. We need to feed it, help it grow, share it with others. We can do a lot with very little. And that’s us, you and me, not all that immense or powerful, but with our little yeast, perhaps we can grow something here.

Last week, Jessica preached on planting a seed in order to grow a garden.

I simply want to say this to follow her: may we be infected with the sweetest, most productive yeast of Christ. May it be like a seed in us, growing from small beginnings, into a mighty, prolific, flourishing community. May we be the people of the yeast, not the people of the cancer. And may we beware of false teachers, huckster salesmen, and empire builders who would happily give us cancer instead of bread.

Amen.