by Dave Wilkinson

Matthew 13:33

December 8, 2002

Nicholas! Born of wealthy parents in 280 A.D. in a small town in Asia Minor. He lost his parents to an epidemic when he was still young but not before they had given him the gift of faith in Jesus Christ. Young Nicholas went to the city of Myra and began to live a life that was full of the giving of himself.

Nicholas lived in humility and joy. So when the local Christian community needed a bishop, he was elected. He was imprisoned for his faith by the Emperor Diocletian and released later by the Emperor Constantine.

Many stories spread about his generosity – about how he begged food for the poor – of how he gave girls money so they would have a dowry to get a husband. The Nicholas story that was most often repeated was how he would disguise himself and go out and give gifts to poor children. He gave away everything he had and everything he could gain from others.

In 314, at age 34, he died. His body was later moved to Italy. But his fame spread throughout the world. There are more churches in the world today named after Nicholas than any other person in the history of the church since Apostolic times.

Oh, people have done strange things to him. Clement Moore gave him a red nose and eight tiny reindeer. Cartoonist Thomas Nast made him big and fat and gave him a red suit trimmed with white fur. Others have given him names: Belsnickle, Kris Kringle.

But what was important about him is that he lived in the mind of Christ. Living in this way, he touched the whole world.

The life of Nicholas is an example of the kind of change that takes place in a man or a woman or a boy or a girl when Jesus comes to live.

Change is the theme of the parable of the yeast. This is a simple parable. It’s very short. But if you understand it, you will understand Christmas.

It is clear that Jesus saw His own incarnation beginning with the cradle of Bethlehem as this yeast. In Jesus, the power of God was being kneaded through the dough of humanity. His life would alter the direction of history -- imperceptibly at first, then undeniably.

Jesus is been speaking to the crowds and then to His disciples about the kingdom of God. He compares the kingdom to a sower, to wheat and tares growing side by side, and to a tiny mustard seed. Now He says that the kingdom of heaven is like "yeast which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until it was all leavened."

Jesus draws His parables from everyday life. Here His source is the kitchen of an ordinary house. He describes a woman doing something that He often saw His mother, Mary do.

Leaven was a piece of dough kept from a previous baking which had fermented in the jar. Nowadays, we might call it "starter." After a time, it was ready to be kneaded into a new batch of dough. It pervades the entire lump with its transforming power. The dough changes its nature and size through the silent, rising impact of the yeast. This is how Jesus says He works in the world and in us.

A notice was sent home with some high school students which read: "Our school’s cross-graded, multi-ethnic, individualized learning program is designed to enhance the concept of an open-ended learning program on the continuum of academically-enriched learning, using the identified intellectually-gifted child as the agent of his own learning." One parent sent back a note which read, "I have a Masters Degree, speak two foreign languages and four Indian dialects – but I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about."

That was never Jesus’ problem. He put the most cosmic things into the most relatable, everyday terms.

Dr. Kenneth Bailey of the Near East School of Theology in Beirut wrote about the parables: "I admired everything about Jesus except His brains – until I began to understand the nature of His theology. Now I realize that Jesus’ parables aren’t meant to illustrate some abstract truth about God. The parables are the truth about God."

The parables don’t illustrate truth. They create truth.

And in a marvelous example of non-sexist imagery, Jesus describes God as a woman – the first century equivalent of the everyday housewife. This woman places some yeast in a lump of dough.

There’s shock here for Jesus’ hearers, because in standard Jewish thought, yeast was a symbol of evil. Perhaps He uses the shock to catch their attention – in the same way as He catches our attention in Matthew 12 where He describes Himself as a thief breaking into someone’s house in order to steal him blind. To assume, as some do, that the yeast must always be a symbol of evil is to twist the parable’s meaning beyond all recognition.

This woman – takes this yeast and sticks it into bread for her family and number of guests. But the small amount of yeast is enough to do the job. The whole big lump is thoroughly leavened.

In the parable of the mustard seed that we looked at last week, Jesus stresses the extensive growth of His kingdom from a small beginning. Now, in this parable of the leaven, He stresses the intensive transforming power of the kingdom from a small beginning. For the yeast doesn’t just get big. It causes change.

Unleavened bread is like a biscuit – hard, dry, unappetizing and uninteresting. Bread baked with yeast is soft, tasty and good to eat – (especially San Francisco sour dough bread with garlic butter). The introduction of the yeast causes a transformation in the dough just as the introduction of the kingdom in the person of Jesus causes a change in human life and human society. Just as the yeast conquers the dough with its power; so the Gospel works to bring about God’s new creation.

Let’s look at some of the elements of this transformation from the image of the yeast.

A first lesson of this yeast is that the kingdom works unseen. We cannot see yeast working in the dough any more than we can see a flower growing. But the work of the yeast is always going on.

In the same way, we cannot see or feel the work of the kingdom many times; but still the kingdom is at work.

Ancient people didn’t understand anything about how yeast worked. They didn’t know about fermentation and carbon dioxide and all the rest. But that didn’t stop them from using it. They knew what happened to bread when they put it is. They knew what happened to mushed up grain when yeast went to work. We have beer mugs from 1200 B.C. to prove it.

The point is that we don’t have to understand how change takes place to know that it does take place and to let it happen to us.

Second, the work of the yeast is certain. Once yeast is introduced, transformation is inevitable. As Paul wrote to the Philippians, "I am confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion." That’s the way yeast works.

In the same way, the work of the yeast is complete – Paul says that it will continue until "we are conformed to the image of God’s beloved Son." The kingdom of God is in the world and it is moving. Even those who reject the kingdom have their lives improved by it – if in no other way than by the need to compete against something better.

But for the one who accepts the kingdom into his or her own life, the change is tremendous.

In I Corinthians 6:9-10, Paul gives a list of the most terrible and disgusting kinds of sinners and then, in the next verse, comes the tremendous statement: "And such were some of you." The Corinthians could look at where they had been before the kingdom entered their lives and see how far they had already come.

The yeast of Christ enters our lives when we accept the love and forgiveness He offers us. We know that we are saved just as we are. But Jesus will not leave us just as we are. Once the yeast of Christ enters our life, it begins to reorganize the "total dough" of the person we are. Everything is touched by His insistent transformation.

He takes charge in us to make us the person He created us to be. That fact is comforting – even if the process is sometimes uncomfortable – when He starts bringing things in our lives to the light of day that we had though safely hidden.

Third, the yeast works without our effort.

Now I don’t want to put too fine a point on this. There are certainly other scriptures which instruct us to deliberately cooperate with God’s work in our lives. In January, I will begin a series from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians. We will look at some of those texts then. But it is still up to the Lord’s power rather than our own human ability. And the more we focus our total attention on the Lord Himself, the more we become like Him. That’s the exciting adventure of Christian growth. Jesus Christ is up to nothing less than making you like Himself. Our task is not to try to buckle-down and develop a checklist of Christian virtues. Our task is to yield ourselves to His work in us and then allow the virtues that Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit to come into being and grown in us.

When I became a Christian and the yeast entered my life, I was a disorganized jumble of insecurities and selfishness. (If you think I’m that way now, you should have seen me before. You can only measure how far someone has come by knowing where they started.) I found it difficult to love anyone very much or to care about anything but my own success. I was judgmental and critical – a perfectionist in others but pretty darn slack with myself. Over the years, as I look back, I find that I have changed. What was once the wilderness of my personality is becoming the endangered frontier.

You don’t have to come up after the service with a checklist of the things you’ve noticed recently. I know I have a long way to go. And every time I think I’ve finally made it, Jesus opens the next chapter of transformation. But I rejoice that it’s going on.

Some people say: "If I could only get out of the way. If I could only stop being myself I could be more Christian." That’s not the point. Yeast doesn’t stop dough from being dough. It changes it into a new kind of dough. And no one would take risen dough and try to dissect it to discern what is dough and what is yeast. The two are inseparably mixed. That’s what Jesus meant when He said: "Abide in Me and I in you." That’s the secret of a transformed life.

Look at the disciples of Jesus. I mean, what a study of unleavened dough they were when Jesus took them on. In the apostolic band, Jesus had a strange mixture of insecure, pushy, introverted, insensitive, arrogant, competitive personalities. He called them "so they might be with Him." He began to slip the yeast into the cracks in their psyches. They were kneaded during the time they spent ministering with Him – as they listened to His words and watched His actions. After Pentecost, the yeast itself took charge. Through the Holy Spirit, they became extensions of Jesus Himself.

Luke, the author of the Gospel, is also the author of the Book of Acts. In the first verse of the Book of Acts Luke says that in the first book, the gospel, he told all that Jesus had begun to do and teach. The implication is plain. Luke saw the Book of Acts as more Gospel – the record of the things Jesus continued to do and teach through men and women who had become extensions of Jesus through the working of the yeast. This included even such a hard case as the Pharisee Paul – the persecutor of the church who began his transformation on the Damascus road.

The message of the parable of the leaven is this – Jesus Christ is at work in the world to bring life out of death and Jesus can infuse this same life into any individual who opens the door – no matter how dead he or she may feel. The message of Christmas is that we can have peace with God and with ourselves.

As Paul writes in Romans 5:1: "Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

The war is over. It also needs to be over for us.

Karl Barth wrote in 1959: "Did you read in the paper recently that two Japanese soldiers were found in the Philippines who had not yet heard, or did not believe, that the war had ended fourteen years ago? They continued to hide in some jungle and shoot at everybody who dared to approach them. Strange people, aren’t they? Well," Barth observed, "we are such people when we refuse to perceive and hold true what the Gospel declares to be the meaning of Jesus Christ. Sin and death are conquered. God’s free gift prevails. His gift of eternal life is for all. Shall we not very humbly pay heed to this message?"

It’s quite a jump from Karl Barth to Charles Shultz. But I can make the jump. For

there is a Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown and Linus are standing looking at the nighttime sky. Charlie Brown asks: "Would you like to see a falling star, Linus?" Linus replies" "Sure – then again, I don’t know. I’d hate to have it fall just on my account!"

It’s funny for Linus to think that a cosmic event could be arranged just for his benefit. But isn’t that what Christmas says to us – that God became flesh in Jesus Christ – that God Himself became that baby in that manger – on our account?

In the manger, we see the power that will change the world. And as we open ourselves to the Savior of this manger, we bring within ourselves the power that changes our lives.

If you’ve never opened that gift, it’s time.