Grocery shopping on Wednesday, I noticed the store had its “home baked” sourdough bread on sale. I do like a good sourdough. So I bought it and this morning I enjoyed a breakfast sandwich made with it. It was very good.
I usually buy the next to the least expensive bread at the supermarket, although I am perfectly capable of baking my own. Indeed, I even have several blue ribbons and a best of show ribbon from the county fair for my whole wheat bread. So why don’t I bake my own on a regular basis? I’m not a morning person. I stay up late and sleep in, usually until 8:30 or so. And though there is no logical reason for it, something gleaned from my mother’s bread baking is that it must be started early in the day — no later than 7:00 AM. That’s so the roughly four hour process will have time to be finished before noon. So if I’m not up by 7:00 AM, I am not baking bread.
I’ve been seeing these recipes online for no-knead, one-bowl sourdough breads that take less time than the traditional methods. They require a sourdough starter rather than commercially available yeast.
Yeast.
My mind wanders to Jesus saying, “a little leaven leavens the whole dough.” I know that is true. A tablespoon of yeast will cause five cups of flour to rise, not once, but three times. But then Jesus also tells his followers, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.” That even a tiny bit of the legalism practiced by the religious elite of His day has the capacity to infect the entire spiritual life of a person.
Next my mind wanders to the Jewish custom, continued to this very day among the Orthodox to thoroughly clean a house from rafters to cellar before Passover. Somehow, before microscopic science could prove it, those ancient Jews knew that yeast, leaven, was hidden in the dust. After the women have spent days scrubbing and dusting, a tiny pile of debris is left in a cupboard. The man of the house, armed with a feather and a piece of paper then hunts out that bit of dust. He sweeps it into the paper, takes it outside and burns it. Then he proclaims, “I have cleaned my house.” All the leaven is gone.
Digging a little deeper, I recall that yeast is a living organism, although dormant until given the correct environment: warm water or milk and sugar. Then it wakes up, feeds on the sugar, and as Alton Brown so indelicately put it, creates the gas that causes bread to rise. That brings me around again to making sourdough starter. The “easy” methods call for using commercial dry yeast to get it going. But the ancient method requires nothing but flour and water and perhaps a little sugar or honey. Flour is mixed with warm water to form a slurry. This sits in an open container in a warm place for several days until bubbles begin to form. Then the starter is fed and part of it used to make bread. Some San Francisco bakeries claim they have kept their starter alive for more than 100 years.
But where did the yeast that caused the fermentation come from? Nowhere…and everywhere. Invisible yeast spores permeate the atmosphere. The only places that possibly do not have any yeast spores are industrial clean rooms with hepa filters that cleanse the air.
And…that brings me back to Passover. God commanded the Jews to prepare for that celebration of freedom to rid their homes of leaven. No leavened baked goods, no sourdough starter, and even the very dust was to be removed from their homes. Not a speck of yeast was to be present.
And yet.
And yet the very air in which they moved and breathed and had their being contained yeast. Quite literally, God’s command was impossible to fulfill…just as perfectly keeping the Mosaic Law and all the Levitical regulations was and is impossible. Even as the rich young ruler who approached Jesus claimed to have done yet walked away from the only One who could do the impossible. So often, we allow the leaven, the yeast of legalism, perfectionism, to convince us that we are righteous in our own strength and habit. Confronted, we defensively claim, “Well, at least I don’t do THAT!”
Jesus tells us to beware the leaven of the Pharisees, to beware the leaven of our age, our culture. It surrounds us as the very air we breathe. It is so easy for it to ferment and infect our worldview, our inner conversations, our habits. But in Jesus, in faith in Him, lies the antidote. Salt kills yeast. Did you know that? In Jesus we find the salt of truth that cleanses us of the leaven of culture, of legalism, of perfectionism. And then He tells us, “Go. Be salt to the world.”
Kathy Kexel 