Rev. Liz Garrigan-Byerly
1 Kings 17:7-16; Matthew 13:33
Good morning and thank you for inviting me into your pulpit this morning. My family began worshipping with you this summer and we are grateful for your warm and gentle welcome. After 10 years of parish ministry, I’m learning how to be a congregant, and you’ve made that easy for me; I’m grateful. This spring, I began working for the Metrowest Worker Center/Casa del Trabajador/Casa do Trabalhador, affectionately referred to as “Casa,” a small non-profit that supports and empowers immigrants around their workplace, civil and human rights. Your generous support of our work, through your Seeds of Grace grant as well as your relationship with specific separated families, means so much to us. Thank you.
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I’m curious if we have any bread bakers among us. Raise your hand if you have ever baked a loaf of bread or watched someone else do it, or seen it on TV.
Isn’t it amazing? A miracle, really; how such simple ingredients-water and flour (and maybe a little flavoring like salt or sugar)—become something completely different, a tasty, life-giving loaf of bread.
Science has given us a window into the miracle: yeast, a life-force of its own. This microorganism, that has been around for hundreds of millions of years, feeds off the carbohydrates and sugars in the grain and releases gas bubbles that make the dough rise, doubling, tripling, quadrupling in size. As it feeds, the yeast releases flavors and nutrients from the grain, which are captured in the space left behind by the escaping air.
There is evidence that humans were grinding and eating grains as far back as 20,000, possibly 30,000 years. Baking with yeast was another huge step in the evolution of human civilization, because of how it unlocks the nutrients of the grains. Scientists do not know for certain when humans began using yeast for our own purposes; they’ve found evidence of humans cultivating wild yeast to make beer, wine and bread as far back as 5,000 years.
Just as humans were “keeping” animals in herds and plants in gardens, they began keeping yeast. The way to do that is with a starter—a jar of water and flour where the yeast is fed and tended so that it can become this never-ending source of life. Before commercially produced dry and instant yeast, this was the only way bake with yeast. Every batch of bread begins with a small bit of the starter.
A family or community’s starter must have been a precious commodity, cared for inside with equal attention and tenderness as the sheep and chickens were outside. When families moved, they were sure to pack their starter. When someone faced calamity and lost their home, the neighbors gave them a new starter. Mothers sent their daughters into their marriages with a starter. Historic records show that settlers in Alaska, kept their starters under their coats in the winter to keep them from freezing.
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“The Kingdom of God is like leaven, that a woman took and mixed with three measures of flour until the whole was leavened.”
No wonder Jesus uses leaven as the metaphor in one of his many parables about the kingdom of God, that time and place when human ways will fully align with God’s ways:
- When justice shall roll down like water;
- Where the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the child shall play by the adder’s den;
- When we will study war no more and turn our swords into plowshares;
- Where God will dry every tear and there will be no more weeping;
- When generosity will replace greed; harmony will replace hatred; beauty will replace brutality;
- Where we will live as kin—flesh of the same flesh and blood of the same blood, connected with and committed to one another.
Jesus says many things about the kindom—that it is drawing near, that it is among us, that it is in us; that we must repent—return to God–to prepare for its arrival; that not all will be able to discern it; that he is giving us, his disciples, the keys to the kindom. Over 2,000 years later, his followers are still pondering his words and what they mean for us now.
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One way of understanding their meaning for us today is to place ourselves in the story. In this parable, we are the woman, mixing the leaven—the kingdom—into our dough—that is our lives, so that it can grow and transform our lives and our world. It’s amazing when that happens, isn’t it? I imagine that each of us can think of a time when we’ve experienced that miracle.
And yet, I confess that these days, I find it challenging to trust in that miracle; I find the call of discipleship daunting. Like the widow of Zarapheth, I fear that I do not have enough to sustain the stranger who comes to me in need, not because my family’s life is on the precipice like hers was, but because the need is so great and the world so troubled; how can my little bit of the kindom make any difference?
Being at Casa for me has been incredibly life-giving, even as day in and day out, I come face to face with the painful reality that I cannot possibly bake enough bread to satisfy the hunger of the people who come through our door. This week alone I had to face the fact that:
- I cannot fix the broken medical and insurance systems that kept a young woman in pain for over a week after a miscarriage as we searched for treatment for her;
- I cannot change the inhuman practices and policies of our government toward the most vulnerable who are seeking refuge in a dangerous world;
- I cannot ease the physical, emotional and financial pain of a worker who has multiple fractures from falling off the roof at a job site and whose employer refuses to admit he was employed by the company;
- I cannot stop the nightmares of children facing the PTSD of being separated from their parents.
It seems that no matter how much mixing and kneading I do, the bread I bake isn’t enough.
Do you ever feel that way? Either because of the state of the world or of your family or of your own spirit?
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Recently, I was talking with a friend who loves to bake sourdough bread, similarly to the way the woman in the parable and the widow of Zarapheth would have baked. Hearing about her baking process gave me a new perspective on the parable, and in doing so, gave me newfound hope.
She turned my gaze from the loaf to the starter.
She described how much attention she has to give her starter. She needs to feed the starter and check it regularly. Is the temperature right? Does it have enough space in the jar? Has it expanded too much and collapsed, which means it needs to be reduced and reenergized. It sounds complicated!
And then she said something that floored me: you basically cannot kill a starter.
Recently, a team of scientists and bakers extracted dormant yeast from a 4,000 year old Egyptian potsherd, created a starter and then baked a loaf of bread with it!
“The kingdom of God is among us and in us.” God has placed it there and there is will stay; it cannot be killed, no matter what we do or don’t do to it.
What if we focused less on the loaf the world needs and more on the starter that will make it possible? Of course we continue to bake bread, but we worry less about how that is going, trusting that the kingdom among us—the leaven—will do its job as we do ours.
What if we check in daily on our starter—the kindom in our midst—and see what it needs from us?
- A bit of food in the form of imagination or trust or joy?
- More space in our hearts or days?
- The heat of righteous indignation or the coolness of contemplation and calm?
- To be split and shared with a neighbor?
Since talking with this friend, I’ve approached my work differently.
- Yes, I tracked down an important medicine for an injured worker who is about to undergo a scary surgery, but in the process, I also laughed and cried and prayed with her and reflected back to her the spark of life and hope I saw in her eyes.
- Yes, I spent 4 tedious hours getting a bond posted for a young asylum seeker, tortured in his country when he advocated for civil rights. But, I forced myself to meditate on his strength to endure the violation of his civil rights in this country and at the vast network of caring, compassionate allies across the country, strangers in Wisconsin and Chicago who were willing to help him reach his family. And my own starter was nurtured by the joyous call from his aunt when he finally reached New York.
- Yes, I fumed over the injustice done to 4 workers not paid for the $11,000 worth of work they did on a multi-million-dollar project.
- But I also witnessed God’s righteousness on fire in them and the allies who will stand with them next week when they present a letter to the contractor. And I saw the kin-dom expand as one worker held his sleeping toddler and heard an ally speak of his grandparents as immigrants and all of us reflect that someday, that toddler’s children will be the ally speaking up for their vulnerable kin.
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The kin-dom is as tenacious as that wild yeast that thousands of years made its way into some dough and produced something miraculous—risen bread!
It is as tenacious today as it was in the midst of a drought and famine in the region of Sidon, when Elijah approached a widow. It is a tenacious today as it was when Jesus walked this earth. It is tenacious in each of our lives, in this community, in the lives of each person who walks through the doors of Casa. It is tenaciously waiting for our tending, so that it can transform the world through us.
How will you tend to your starter this week?
How will you nurture the kindom in your mist?
Whatever we do, may we just trust that it will be enough.
Just as it was enough for the widow and her son and Elijah.
Thanks be to God. Amen.