Killing Yeast

1 Corinthians 5:6 through 1 Corinthians 5:8 (RSV) ⁶Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? ⁷Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

I have enjoyed baking bread. I received a “bread machine” as a gift one Christmas. It was convenient, but the product was not as good as hand made and it sorted the defeated my reason for making bread is the first place; which was the doing of it. Frankly, sometimes I needed to knead. In making bread, with machine or by hand, one knows to avoiding killing the yeast. Salt, a biblical symbol for cleansing, and yeast, a biblical symbol for sin, does not mix.

Yeast is an excellent symbol for sin. It affects the entire “lump.” The lump is the symbol for the community of faith, the Church. Salt, the working of holiness, kills the yeast of sin. It is helpful for us to consider the interaction between the affects of sin and the work of holiness in our lives and in our churches.

The reason for casting out the leaven of sin is not to secure our redemption. That is fully accomplished by Christ, our paschal lamb, who dies for all our sins and, thereby, saves us from Hell and death and makes us completely fit for Heaven and for new life.

Yet, cast out sin we must. The tools for doing this are sincerity and truth. The forces against this work of holiness consist of malice and evil.

Today, gently look at the sin in your heart. Be as loving with yourself and others as Christ was toward those sinners he met along the way. At one point, it is written, he looked at a sinner and “loved him.” Then he tells him exactly how he is to repent. Christ’s salvation is never a license to sin. It is, if the truth were known, a license not to sin. It is a liberty from the bondage of sin.

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

John Donne (1572–1631)

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.