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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 1, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Another in our sermon series on the elements of baking. We look at bread and yeast. Rabbi Jesus told a parable about how the kingdom of heaven, or the Beloved Community is like yeast. What could that mean for us?
Chalice Lighting
At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.
Call to Worship
From THE HOUSE OF BELONGING
by David White“This is not the age of information, forget the news and the radio and the blurred screen. This is the time of loaves and fishes: the people are hungry. We say one good word, and it can become bread for a thousand.”
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Moment for Beloved Community
“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”
– The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Meditation Reading
“[Jesus] said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’ “
Again he asked, “What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.”
Sermon
In the Jewish faith story, the Hebrew people, descendants of Abraham and Sarah, had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. Moses, their liberator, said to the Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” The Pharaoh was reluctant, since he’d needed the labor of the people to build his economy. Then came the plagues. The water turned to blood, and no one could drink it. Frogs infested the land, then flies. Then all the cattle got sick, then the people got boils. Hail came, then locusts. Then the skies turned dark so you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face. The last plague was that the first born children of all the Egyptians died overnight. After that final plague the Pharaoh said he would let Moses’ people go. The Hebrew people were told to make unlevened bread, which we now know as Matzoh bread, a bread with no yeast, made only of flour, olive oil, water and salt. This was fast and simple bread to make, and a person could live on it for a short time.
You can mix grain and water together and live on the paste for a little while, but you will soon die. If, however, you give the flour and water time, if you mix it together and set it on a counter in your kitchen, after a few days it will start to bubble. I don’t know which prehistoric person saw the grain and water porridge bubbling in a bowl in the corner and thought “I’m going to bake that in the fire,” but they are the first baker of bread. Anthropologists are divided about whether the first person to see the bubbling said “I’m going to bake that,” or whether they said “I’m going to drink that.” You have the “bread before beer” scientists, and you have the “beer before bread” scientists.
If you let that flour and water paste we started with take its time, that is, if you don’t have to run away from the pursuing armies of Egypt, then you can have levened bread, and leavened, or yeasted bread can sustain your life indefinitely. Where does the yeast come from? It’s wild, it’s in the air. Yeast is a fungus that floats in the biosphere. If you give it time, it will find your flour and water and start to break down the starches in the mixture, forming sugar. This is fermentation. When the yeast breaks down the cell walls of the starch, it gives off carbon dioxide, which makes the bubbles and creates the holes you see when you tear open a loaf of yeasted bread.
Bill read a pair of parables for our meditation reading, parables attributed by the author to Rabbi Jesus. He was describing the Kingdom of Heaven, which we could translate as “the Beloved Community.”
The Beloved community is like a mustard seed, which a gardener planted. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches. It’s like yeast that a baker took and mixed into about sicty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.
Something that starts small can have a large effect. Helping build the Beloved Community doesn’t have to be enormous sweeping actions, but small ones, persistent, breaking down the walls of apathy and ignorance in order to create something that will nourish souls and transform lives.
In the series Cooked, on Netflix, botanist Michael Pollan talks about bread. How it was one of humanity’s first foods, how bread (or beer) was the reason humans changed from being nomadic hunters to being farmers of wheat and other grains. To plant and have a harvest, people have to stay in one place for a period of time. Staying in one place means you will probably build dwellings that can last for at least a year. It may mean that you will have to defend your harvest from those who didn’t plant it, but who may want it for themselves. Staying in one place means that when your people die, you will probably make one place where you bury their bodies, and you may develop some rituals, ceremonies to render those burials sacred.
When you have beer and bread, thanks to the wild yeast in the air of your place, you have conviviality, feasting, you survive, and you have nourishment and intoxication. Bread is the staff of life, a metaphor for a thing you need every day. In the Cooked series, you see a boy, maybe 10 years old, in Morocco, picking up the tray on which are the loaves his mother has kneaded and shaped that morning. He takes them to the neighborhood baker, whose is the only house with an over. He bakes all day, loaves the neighborhood families bring to him. The flour comes from all over the world: Ukraine, Germany, France, because Morocco can’t grow enough grain to make the bread eaten by all of its people. Bread is the spoon that they scoop up the dinner. Bread is the plate.
My mother, who was raised in what is now Pakistan, would wash dishes muttering grumpily about the wastefulness of having to buy, store and wash plates, when in India, she’d say, the plate is the bread, and when you are finished with the meal, the plate is gone. In some cultures it is an offence to take a knife to bread. It wants to be handled, torn, to have the shape of a human action instead of a metal tool.
When you have kneaded bread, and it has become smooth and stretchy, and then it rises, it has much the same feel to your hand as a human body, as if this were a baby smooth under your hands. It feels as if it could be part of you, or you part of it.
Here is what I want you to remember. The Beloved Community is like yeast. You don’t have to change everything all at once. This is true within us and in our communities. I told you two weeks ago that when I was in seminary, the women started calling God “she.” It was like a tiny seed that grew and changed everything, giving the birds of our lived experience a place to rest. The idea was like yeast, that started bubbling and soon we were all rising. Have you ever heard or seen something that seemed small at first, but changed the way you saw things? Another thing that changed me was when I followed a suggestion that, watching TV or movies, I switched the genders of the people involved. Another seed is reversing the ethnicity of people you see. On Face Book there was a meme with a row of Asian women laughing, on their phones, having pedicures done by white women.
Tiny things can start big things in the culture. Greta Thunberg began her climate change activism sitting in front of the Swedish parliament building in August of 2018. How far have things come from there? Young climate change activists have been the yeast that levens an enormous amount of flour. And we are all rising. People, ideas, songs can be yeast, a small beginning that changes everything. When 10 percent of a group begin to talk about something, people shrug them off as fringe folks. When 20 percent talk about something, people begin to notice, and it feels like everyone is talking about it. When 30 percent of people are on the bus, talking about that idea, it feels like a movement. When you have 40 percent, you can win over the rest of the people easily. You can see that in this 2 minute video from Derek Sivers.
VIDEO
The poet said “This is not the age of information… the people are hungry. We help one another rise. We say one good word, and it can become bread for a thousand.”
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