When I was inducted as Team Rector here, there was an unusual ceremony at the end – devised I think by Mandy Hodgson the then curate.  Each of the team ministers gave me a little gift which had some significance for our ministry here.  Mandy’s gift was a lump of yeast – presumably because we, the ministers, were to be the leaven in the lump – which puts all you in your place at least!  It was certainly a memorable moment and whenever I meet with friends who were at the service they tend to say ‘remember the yeast!”  After the service it disappeared and we have never found it. So somewhere in this church, in some hidden corner perhaps, there is a lump of yeast quietly waiting to be activated.

Yeast figures briefly in one of the Parables which Jesus told and which we have just heard in this morning’s Gospel.  It comes in a section of St. Matthew’s Gospel (Chapter 13) which is often called The chapter of the Parables  because it is a string of stories Jesus told – some with explanations like the Sower and the Wheat & Tares but mostly standing alone, each making its own particular and fairly obvious point.  The nature of Parables are that they are teaching stories with one particular point and the ones we heard this morning are all about the building up of God’s Kingdom. In each one, Jesus says The Kingdom of heaven is like….

So the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed the smallest of all seeds which grows into a great bush. From small beginnings the Kingdom grows. It grows out of little acts of faith which mount up. It also tells us that we can be part of this building of the Kingdom no matter how small our contribution to it may seem to be. This is quite important for us because the Kingdom of God is not built separately from our own lives and then handed to us as a reward for good behaviour. God involves us in the building and unless we are part of this then we remain outside it.  The mustard seed reminds us that even the smallest contribution grows into something bigger.  It’s rather an extravagant illustration but Jesus is telling us that we are all bigger than we think we are, in the eyes of God, and that in all our lives there is potential for bigger and better things. If we have a low expectation of ourselves then we must look carefully at the mustard seed. Small though it is, it has within it the power to grow mightily.  So too with us. Every small act of faith, of love, of care for others; every prayer we utter; are all part of our potential to grow bigger as Christians.  Do not think for one moment that you have nothing of value to offer to God – you have the greatest offering of all – your hearts and your lives dedicated to him. Of such is the Kingdom of God.

Each of the parables in today’s Gospel needs careful meditation as we sift them for their meaning but the key to our thinking should be phrased as a question – What is this saying to me about my faith and about my attitude to God?  Parables are not, as I said last week, stories about the world situation or church politics – they are primarily personal challenges about how we live our own Christian life. They are sometimes a warning about that like the parable of the net of fishes which includes one of Matthew’s favourite themes of separating the good from the bad,  but often, because this is the nature of Jesus, the parables are told for our encouragement.  That is particularly true of the parable of the mustard seed.

When Jesus talks to us about the Kingdom of God he is doing so out of his deep longing and desire that we are part of that Kingdom. It is our Salvation, our place in the heart of God’s love, that concerns him. You may not think yourself worthy of God’s love or of Salvation but God thinks differently and Jesus is the proof of that.

There is a tremendous Inclusivity about the Gospel which is not always present in the Church. There are Christians who spend a lot of energy on working out how to exclude others and making it impossible for people to be part of God’s scheme of things. Of course they themselves are in danger of playing God and that, surely, carries its own penalty.  Only God decides who can be in His Kingdom and it is our duty to discard anything that Jesus would not recognise as the teaching about God that he gave us.  For that teaching we need to steep ourselves in the Gospel absorbing from it all the goodness it offers.

Jesus spoke of yeast today as something which is the ingredient for growth of God’s kingly love very specially in our souls.  On another occasion, however, he used the imagery of yeast in a very different way.  He warned his followers to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Mt 16:5).  The warning came when the disciples had forgotten to bring bread for their journey so Jesus, as always, plucked his illustration from the immediate circumstance but he wasn’t talking about bread.  The Pharisees and Sadducees had just tried to test and trap Jesus, asking him to give them a sign from heaven.  Of all the people he encountered, it was these religious groups who fed on self-righteousness that He despised most of all.  He saw their self-seeking; their false teaching; the way they burdened people with rules and regulation; with impossible goals; and through which they oppressed the people and laid on them a heavy yoke.

What, of course, they lacked was love and passion. It was cold, clinical religion. The God they offered was vengeful and distant and demanded sacrifices that few could afford. They kept the rules but their hearts were not in it because they had, as Ezekiel once described it, hearts of stone.  In Chapter 34 Ezekiel speaks of the leaders of Israel as Shepherds who have failed their people. They have been consumed with self-interest; they have failed to care, to heal, to gather the lost, and have ruled with harshness and oppression.  This is how Jesus sees the Pharisees and Sadducees and Ezekiel’s solution to their rule – that God will return as the Shepherd who brings all his sheep back to the fold – is, of course, precisely what he is doing in Jesus. The prophesy is fulfilled.  Love and joy, acceptance and hope and salvation have returned to the world. Woe betide and Christian church or group that gets in the way of that! 

In today’s story Jesus uses the image of Yeast in a much more positive way than about the Pharisees and Sadducees.  The woman in the story is doing what was natural in everyday life – baking bread.   A lot of it!  The amount of yeast – three handfuls!  I read somewhere that it was enough yeast to make bread to feed over 150 people.  Jesus is being extravagant again not only because God’s love for us is indeed extravagant but also, by extension, we are to be extravagant in how much we love and how much we share the Gospel with others.

This Gospel Kingdom we share in building demands us to think big (remember the mustard seed) and to act generously.  The yeast is a symbol of God’s love acting in our lives so that our lives become love – all consuming, all embracing.  The world needs a generous dollop of it and we, who discover it in our own lives,  are to be signs of it amongst all we meet.  St Paul speaks of us as being the leaven in the lump -  the people who are kind of secret agents in the world, quietly acting upon the ingredients of human life we see around us, and of which we are part, and by our action of love we encourage growth and change in others just as yeast encourages growth in the baking. 

Evangelism, true evangelism, is a sharing of our experience of God with others. It is  saying, in some way, that we know God loves and cares for us; that he has saved us from sin in Jesus Christ and that he has widened our horizons so that it includes the kingdom – the universal transforming love which dawns upon the world and embraces it and heals it and moves it towards God.  The desire to offer and share this transforming love with others is at the heart of Christian Evangelism.  If we believe that God has given us the Kingdom then we must also believe that this changes both the direction of our lives and its quality.  The most convincing evangelism is when we say Look what God has done for me; look at how my life is different; look at how much I am loved – and that can all be yours.

In our Lord’s scheme of things Story plays an important part – not just the stories he told as parables but the story he wrote with his own life.  This is a story we share and add to it our own experience.  One of the things I love about the Acts of the Apostles is that it doesn’t end. St. Luke takes Paul to Rome and he stays there and Luke puts down his pen.  What happens after belongs to the Church’s on-going story. The Acts of the Apostles is still being written and each of us, each of our lives, adds a new page to it.  So we become part of the story of salvation; the story of the Kingdom; and our lives express something of God’s on-going story.

The writer Robert McCammon  wrote this:

The story of Jesus, of his Gospel, of the Kingdom, is part of our bones and we have a story to tell – and people need to hear it.

Maybe we shall use words; more often it will be our action or our attitude to life and hopefully our joy because we know God loves us. We need to be walking parables in whose lives people can read of Jesus Christ saving us from within and giving us the Kingdom because, as St. Luke tells us in 12:32 that is our Father’s good pleasure.  What a story we have to tell – we mustard seeds and lumps of yeast! We should tell it and go on telling it – that’s evangelism and that’s how God’s Kingdom will be built up.

I never found the yeast after my induction but in another way I have found it actually – it is sitting in front of me.