Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, July 30, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Laurel Tallent.
Genesis 29:15-28
Psalm 105:1, 7-11, 45b
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Kneading Dough by Julie Lonneman
For the past few weeks we’ve been hearing Jesus describe the “secrets of the kingdom of heaven” as he puts it earlier in the chapter, through these parables: it’s like a field that gives life to both wheat and weeds, it is a careful and attentive sower, it is like mustard, which is itself a weed that would disrupt a field of wheat but would give safe harbor to the birds, it is a tiny amount of yeast worked into 60 pounds of flour, it is a net that catches fish indiscriminately, it is a precious thing that is hidden, that is found, that is bought for a steep cost.
In these parables, what I hear is the the kingdom of god is being turned this way and that, to see what angle will allow it to fit into our minds. Kind of a “pivot! Pivot!” Moment (the only reference to Friends I recognize). Which of these stories will click, and allow Jesus’ disciples and crowds that transient transcended moment of “yes. I get it” before it slips from our grasp again.
Last week, Stephen alluded to the agrarian audience that Jesus was speaking to. I imagine that agricultural similes like the parable of the sower and the parable of weeds among the wheat hold nuances that we don’t have access to in our current context, and maybe that’s why Jesus takes parable after parable like rabbits out of a hat for the other non-farmers around him: “Oh, this one isn’t landing for you? How about this one? It is important to me that you understand what we are building together."
In the statistics courses I scraped through I was introduced to the aphorism “all models are wrong, but some are useful” by statistician George Box. Any statistical model we came up with in my working group could never fully capture whatever relationships we were trying to define between ADHD and writing scores. These parables could never capture the entire nature of the kingdom of heaven, but some of them are useful. They can hold our attention, they can make God feel closer to our day-to-day or a part of the work we are familiar with. They can snaps that light of insight for a second. They can be something that makes you wonder.
I wonder which disciple resonated with each parable, and I wonder about the specific shade of meaning they garnered from them. I wonder how they would articulate that meaning.
As I was preparing this sermon, the parable that was useful to me - and I say that because it was the one that held my attention the longest - was the shortest parable, “the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it is leavened”.
First of all - tremendous amount of flour. This batch will feed a community, or a family, no doubt. But if you’ve never mixed dough for a batch of loaves before - it’s messy, what I would call “a sensory nightmare” of gummy wet flour patches and loose powder that would ruin the loaf if they aren’t mixed in. And you keep going, mixing until the texture becomes smoother, but the smoother dough is more difficult to work because now it’s stronger. It’s less messy but more laborious the more water and flour mix together. And if you’re working with a starter of wild yeast, you need to make sure it also disperses evenly into the dough. It has a tendency to glom onto itself as a slimy ball of half-digested flour, not mixing in smoothly unless you cut it in intentionally. So your work is paying attention to “mixing” but “mixing” itself involves many smaller interventions.
And beyond the effort of mixing itself, there is the uncertainty in measuring, or more like feeling, how much progress you’ve made in kneading. Has the yeast been distributed enough? Is the dough strong enough? Your first inclination that your work was done adequately, that your dough was leavened, comes hours after you’ve set it aside. I can hear the baker ask:
When will this work be done?
When will I know that I did it right?
The last word of the parable assures us that this flour was leavened, the yeast was spread. The labor was not in vain, the baker will accomplish her task, but it is grueling and likely repetitive work. We can not take for granted that the bread will be leavened; we can not assume that the arc of history will bend towards justice of its own accord.
To me, the central theme of the parable is not the leavening. The central theme of the parable is the baker’s effort to facilitate the leavening.
But who is the baker in this story? I’ll admit that I wrote this homily almost all the way through before realizing that I never questioned who I thought it was. Having been raised on these parables as instruction for individual action, I easily slip into the assumption that I am the one who must take up my dough and knead, that I am the one who must sell all of their belongings for the singular goal of possessing the kingdom of heaven. But is that how Jesus’ audience understood it, and is that what Jesus was picturing? A single worker with an individual prize?
I strongly suspect that the answer is more collective, in partnership with the Holy Spirit. No one of us is the baker, the merchant or the trespasser (man in the field). But collectively we are.
You know what similes and parables aren’t great at? Identifying specific action items.
So I turn to the the epistle today, not for the exact directions I am looking for, but for a little comfort, and a dose of inspiration; Likewise the Spirit held us in our weakness for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.
You are not a lone baker, you do not do this work alone. We are directed with sighs too deep for words, to build a kingdom that can not be described with any number of pictures.
I wonder which of the parables today resonate with you.
I invite your reflections on this and any of our readings today.