What Do We Do while the Bread Rises 1-19-14

God, it’s an exciting time here and now in Open Circle.  Show us how to be as excited about us as you are.  Lead us in the ways of love so that we may draw others to the blessings of knowing they are loved and cherished.  We look to you for healing, wholeness and truth.  Amen

I woke up this morning thinking of my grandmother’s cinnamon rolls.  All the thinking of yeast and bread this week had led me right back to one of my favorite tastes in the whole world.  I watched my grandmother preside over this 4-6 hour process and in the end, I would be rewarded with warm, soft, sticky yeast rolls.  On some days, it seemed that was the longest four hours in the world.  I can remember wanting to watch as the dough would rise in the big blue crock with the checkered dish towel laid on top.  My grandmother would always send me off to do some small chore or to go to the mailbox and check and see if the mail was there.  Just like a watched pot never boiling, presumably, watched dough never rises either, or so it seemed. 

This is one of Jesus’ shortest stories ever, but full of meaning, particularly for us at this point in our Capital Campaign.  Back when I was helping my grandmother make cinnamon rolls, the world was a very different place.  And not just in rural Indiana; but, in many places.  Everybody I associated with spent at least a part of their Sunday at church.  All over town, parking lots would be full as “the faithful”  participated in Sunday School and Worship in their mostly inherited traditions.  We dressed up for church—hence, the colloquialism—“Sunday Best”.  My female friends, do you remember crinolines that we wore under our skirts so they would poof out just perfectly.  How in the world did we sit in those things—been too long ago for me to remember.  Our shoes were shined and little boys often had smart three-piece junior suits to wear.  There wasn’t a lot to do on Sundays.  Stores weren’t open in most of the smaller towns and football didn’t yet rule the world—so Sunday pretty much belonged to God. 

We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.  Well, duh, you might be saying.  Here’s the problem—many of us, while realizing that the world we live in has changed, aren’t ready yet to see that the “church”, if it is to be meaningful to the world, must change as well.  In earlier times many churches had what they called an “open door” approach to spreading the word about their churches and the goodness of God.  That consisted mostly of opening the door and ‘viola’ there were the people.  If we merely open our doors, we are likely to see nothing but the cows across the road.  So, what meaning does Jesus’ two line parable have for us in the reality that we face?

Here’s that reality.  In a recent poll, it was discovered that many people who consider themselves to be “good Christians” go to church about once every six weeks.  A majority of people, as high as 66%, now consider themselves to have no active faith affiliation.  Sunday is not a sacred day any more.   Everything is open on Sunday.  There is one, count them, one chain fast food place that closes on Sunday.  Stores are open, and no one thinks twice about scheduling all kinds of things during the Sunday morning traditional worship hour.  If we had more children in our midst this would be made painfully obvious.  Coaches think very little now about scheduling mandatory practices on Sunday.   Play rehearsals, study groups and all kinds of school-related activities happen on Sunday.   Weddings and funerals increasingly take place outside of church facilities which means that more and more people don’t even go inside churches anymore.   People often do not see the need to “give up” their Sundays to participate in an institution that seemingly has less and less to do with their day-to-day lives. 

As a church, we must ask ourselves if we believe that the church, particularly this church, has anything to offer those not yet attending.  This is an important question and should be influencing what we do while the bread is rising.  But we must be careful how we ask the question.  We usually, from our lofty position of being in church, refer to folks who don’t attend church as the ‘unchurched’.  Aha, we show our prejudice immediately.  We would gladly admit that we are Unfed only when we are hungry.  We are unclothed only when we are naked; and, we are unenlightened only when we seek enlightenment.  Since more and more of our friends and neighbors do not see the need for church, we can hardly call them “unchurched”.  In fact, percentage-wise, we are now the “un’s” although I haven’t quite figured out what goes with the ‘un’ yet.  Perhaps, un-changing, or un-fun people.

Now you know that I believe with all my heart that we have many things to offer these folks—many of whom do not state that they are missing anything.  I won’t presume, at this point to list what I think we have to offer—that is the subject for another sermon.  What I want you to hear today is that I believe we must change the way we ‘do’ church.  People, outside these walls, are more interested in how we ‘be’ church than how we do it.  Only inside the walls do we believe that we have the time and interest to debate the ‘how’ of doing church.  It would not even occur to most of the folks outside today on the golf course, at a mall, or sitting on their porches reading the Sunday paper, to even think about how we are worshipping or what words we are using.  That dialog is reserved for those of us already ‘in’ the circle.  When you look at it that way, it’s more than a little humbling. 

Jesus uses the simplest of examples to illustrate truth for us.  While we may not understand the process, most of us know that yeast is what causes bread to rise.  Unleavened bread is usually pretty flat because it doesn’t have those delightful pockets of air caused by the yeast to make it soft and light.  In fact, when the Israelites fled the evil Pharaoh, they left the yeast in Egypt by mistake.  And you have to have some yeast to have more yeast.  So, they ate unleavened bread which has become traditional in Passover and shows up in the communion wafers we use today.  But, it doesn’t take much yeast to make all the difference in the world. 

When you add yeast to bread dough and it gets all mixed in; and, you can’t really ever get it back out of the flour.  Jesus is saying to us that it doesn’t take much to begin to influence the bread.  Compared to the amount of flour one uses, the amount of yeast is very small indeed.  But had my grandmother forgotten to put the yeast in those cinnamon rolls, I would have been eating cinnamon flatbread.   This gives me a lot of hope.  We don’t have to have enough yeast to change the world all by ourselves.  We just have to have enough yeast to influence the loaves of bread we have been called to bake. 

What, then, is Jesus saying to us when he speaks about the Rule of God’s Justice—often called the Kingdom of God?  I believe that this teaching of Jesus calls us to the place of understanding that God often begins in very small ways.  But, once the yeast has been mixed in, it begins to cause the bread dough to rise far beyond the size of the original mixture.  I believe that while we wait for the bread to rise, while we watch it rising before our eyes we can meditate upon what it means for us personally and communally to be like yeast.  Re-thinking Church is re-thinking how God’s unconditional love as it is lived out here on this earth.  As a church, we must do two things:  one—we must begin more and more, to take the church into the world.  The world doesn’t need to hear about church—an institution which has failed in so many ways; they want to see us ‘be’ church.  Even with regard to Jesus:  they don’t want to hear about him; they want to see his teachings at work in their lives and in the life of the world. 

This is the time when the yeast of our hope and faithfulness is beginning to work in the rising of the bread.  This is the time we have to think of new ways of being church in a world that doesn’t want much of what we are offering.  This is the time to rethink all that we are as church.  You can be the yeast of change and power or you can be the flour dependent on another substance to enable you to rise.  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be yeast.  I think most of you would.  Next week we’ll talk about how some of those changes—those transformations about how we ‘be’ church—influence our life here together as Open Circle.  This week, be the yeast.  Let what you give of yourself be empowered and enlarged by God’s own abundance.  Begin to be the change in the world and in the church you want to see.  Amen and amen.