I Corinthians 5:1-8

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you? For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing. When you are assembled, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not a good thing. Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

In the refrigerator of my childhood lived a jar. A big Mason jar with a screw-top lid not fastened down all the way. Inside the jar lived what we called “our pet.” The pet had been living for almost forty years by the time it got to us, handed down from my great-grandmother. Each week, my mother would remove the jar from the fridge and carefully lift the lid, remove the waxed paper from under the lid, and measure out a cup of grayish-white, gloppy substance, which she would then set aside in a bowl covered by a damp kitchen towel. Back into the jar went a half-cup of flour and a half-cup of warm water. Sometimes, she would pour off a sour-smelling yellowish liquid. Sometimes, she’d stir the liquid back into the goop in the bottom of the jar. She never needed to add anything else, and frowned upon my aunts who also had a jar of the pet, but fed theirs yeast water and sugar with the flour.

No, my mother was a sourdough-starter purist. That’s what the pet was, a good mother sponge, with some hooch on the top, all of which made the most glorious pancakes and bread: rye bread, Parkerhouse rolls, muffins—it fed our family for years and years. It was a vigorous starter—a simple colony of native yeast and lactobacillus that had been alive four decades, passed from mother to daughter and divided among friends and family. Just a cup of the stuff would make two big two-pound loaves. And it needed fed nothing but flour and water.

Once a year, though, my mother would take out a cup as usual, but instead of stirring and feeding the sponge, she would throw the whole thing out and sterilize the jar with boiling water. Adding the cup of starter back in, she would begin anew, this time adding two cups each of flour and water. She said it was to invigorate the yeast and liven up the culture. We would watch the mixture for a couple of days as it sat on the counter: mysterious little bubbles formed on the top and the whole thing turned a creamy white. In my childhood, leaven was connected with joy, food, family and the memorable smell of baking bread.

Paul, however, speaks of leaven as an evil thing of malice. Against the backdrop of Judaism, with its Passover prohibitions forbidding any speck of yeast to remain in the household before the high holy day, it is easy to understand why Scripture usually, but not always, regards yeast and leaven as representative of the old life of sin.

I ran across this in my parish several years back. The Sunday school students were baking bread for a unit on Holy Communion. The plan was to have the bread used in the Eucharist the following Sunday. An older couple objected, though, citing this passage in I Corinthians, and proclaiming their opposition to the use of leavened bread for the Sacrament because, and I quote, “Where there is leaven in the bread, there can be no Jesus.”

It’s an odd misinterpretation of this passage. For all my extended metaphor, Paul isn’t really talking about bread but rather about the life of the Christian and the life of the church. This is about believer behavior, not about would-be Christians. For believers, there can be no winking at sin, as Luther put it. To permit in the Body of Christ those who continue willfully and brazenly to engage in the actions of their old sinful selves is to invite evil upon the church.

To tolerate those who call what is sin not-sin in the name of tolerance and inclusivity is to include within the community of believers what must not be included lest it leaven the whole batch with foreign yeast that will destroy the very foundation of the bread. To allow the immorality of the world to flourish in the Church to satisfy a cultural ethos or the zeitgeist of white upper class North Americans is a danger to the soul on the day of the Lord.

But to be arrogant… to be arrogant and boast of our doctrinal, if not political, correctness and scriptural rigor and orthodox credentials and great-tradition faithfulness is also to stir in the yeast of malice and insincerity. Shall we stand aloof in long robes with loud prayers, fingers wagging and tongues clucking at our brethren who have fallen into grave error? Or shall we mourn their sin as our own, bearing their burdens, and lamenting for them and us both between the vestibule and the altar, where the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and cry: “Spare your people, O Lord!”

Generations of commentators, from Origen to Luther to Wesley have seen this passage as only about church discipline, and the casting out of the unrepentant believers. That’s not inaccurate, of course. But to see this word only in terms of “who is in and who is out and how to behave” is to miss the wider picture of just how insidious the evil leaven is. To see this passage as only about obedience to doctrinal, theological, ethical and moral purity in the life of the Christian and especially in the life of the pastor, is to miss the fact that, at the end, even our virtues are burned away. We would never dream of the type of immorality that Paul writes about—oh no, we are far more slippery. Public virtues turn into private vices in less time than it takes dough to rise. Or to quote the great Sheldon Tostengard, preaching professor at Luther Seminary: “Angels and demons have the same backbone.”

We are not allowed to excuse our sin, as we Lutherans are so wont to do, as a matter of irredeemable bondage, a facile “I can’t help myself, it’s how I am.” We who belong to Christ are freed from the power of sin and given the power of the Holy Spirit to resist the devil who prowls around like a lion, seeking to devour us.

But the reality is, that what we think of as good in our lives, in our hearts, in our work in the parish, in our families—all is corrupted with a sticky yeast, the sin that clings so closely that makes running the race so hard. All our Lenten disciplines, all the works of our hands and hearts are dust; all our resolve to be better pastors, better husbands, wives, better parents, children—all flat and tough as dough made with old yeast, dough that has been worked too hard and handled too much.

Where will come the rising?

From the Body proofed in the warm space of Mary’s womb and finished in stone oven of the grave. The Body that came out on the third day, burnished and golden, like and yet unlike, too much for mortal hands to hold on to, but just enough for mortal mouths to contain.

These words of Paul to the Corinthians have alleluias working up through them like tiny, active bubbles. For all the instruction on immorality, this reading is found in only one place in the lectionary: on Easter evening. Some of the most glorious melodies in the chant of the Eastern and Western churches are reserved for these words: “Christ our Passover Lamb is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” Luther picks up the theme in his hymn Christ Lag in Todesbanden: “So let us feast this Easter day on Christ the bread of heaven/ The Word of Grace has purged away the old and evil leaven/ Christ alone our souls will feed/ he is our meat and drink indeed/ Faith lives upon no other. Alleluia!”

Faith lives upon no other: the bread that gives life to the world. The Body of Christ, both in the sacrament of the altar and in the word of absolution spoken by God once and for all on the cross: this and this alone purges the leaven of malice and insincerity and arrogance and boasting and self-righteousness, as well as the more obvious of our sins. This bread cleans out the old yeast, the virtues turned poison, much as my mother purged the starter once a year, except with transformative power far beyond that of water and flour and time. The flesh and blood of God brings sincerity and truth, truth that we are kneaded and shaped by a God whom we need for our very lives. Our rising is nothing more and nothing less than his.

It is not true that “where there is leaven, there can be no Jesus.” My parishioners were wrong about that. It is precisely where there is leaven—the old and evil leaven—that Jesus is. Even in the church, even among believers, even among brothers and sisters in the ELCA who believe they please God with sin—shall you and I not be the leaven of sincerity and truth to those who lie dead? Shall we not, even with fear and trembling for our own sins, known and unknown, be as Mary Magdalene, bearing tidings of the Lord’s rising?  One apple may spoil the whole barrel, but what of the other way around? One light on a lampstand, one city on a hill, one pinch of salt, one bit of yeast… and the proclamation that “the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news” bubbles up in the Mason jar, until there is no place it cannot reach. Until, like the scent of baking bread in my childhood, it wafts everywhere, the aroma of Christ to God, the fragrance that comes from knowing him. The fragrance that bids us to the table that is set in the presence of enemies, even enemies of the cross of Christ. The wedding banquet of the Lamb. The feast of rich food and well-aged wines strained clear where the shroud of death is destroyed forever. The grain Joseph gives to his brothers, however tortuous the route, foreshadows the manna in the wilderness, which prefigures the bread come down from heaven, and whoever eats of this bread will live forever.

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast. Let us keep this Lent and the coming Easter and every day of our life and work with repentant sincerity founded on a truth not our own, leavening the whole batch, until we, too, are proofed in the grave to rise new and whole. Amen.

Pari R. Bailey is Pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Bellview, Minnesota. She preached this sermon on March 2, 2010, for the Minnesota chapter of the Society of the Holy Trinity.