Like Garlic and Gym Socks--July 21, 2022

Like Garlic and Gym Socks--July 21, 2022 

"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...." [ 1 Corinthians 5:6-7a]

You could call it the Bryl-Creem Principle:  a little dab will do ya.  

For good and for ill, it's true--a small amount of something potent has a way of affecting everything it touches.  That was the marketing gimmick for the hair product called "Bryl-Creem," and it's true of lots of things, pleasant and unpleasant alike.  Spices like garlic, paprika, hot pepper, or cumin have a distinctive flavor, and a little of each goes a long way.  The smell of one old gym sock left in a bedroom, or one person's cigarette if they smoke in your car, has a way of lingering and sinking into the walls or upholstery so you can't get it out even after a lot of scrubbing and a long time passing.  Good and bad alike, these things permeate the whole environment in which they are placed, whether it's a simmering pan of sauce, a teenager's room, or your SUV.

And it's the same with yeast being worked into dough as well.   A little bit--say, a tablespoon or two--will be enough for a recipe that produces two hearty sized loaves.  It really is almost like magic, taking a small amount of those earthy smelling granules, working them into flour and water, and with time and some warmth, watching the dough rise and grow far larger than it had been at the start.  The discovery of yeast to make dough has to be one of my favorite and most important accomplishments in human history, and I can only guess and wonder how our ancestors figured it out.

But the curious thing about yeast in the Bible is that it's sort of a two-sided coin, at least as a metaphor.  Jesus uses yeast leavening bread as a parable of the kingdom of God--he says that just like a woman will take a small amount of yeast to mix in with the flour, so the small but potent presence of the Reign of God in the world brings about the transformation of the whole.  There, the Bryl-Creem Principle is a good thing--a little dab will do ya, and a little yeast [the Reign of God] will have a profound effect on the whole world.  But on the flip side, you get times like this snippet of Paul's from First Corinthians, where the metaphor works in the opposite way.  Here, the idea that a little yeast will leaven the whole batch of dough is an ominous warning--it's rather like saying, "I've just put a little bit of arsenic in your tea."  A little goes a long way there, too, and you're not going to want to let anyone put even a tiny amount of poison in your cup.  

Just as surely as a small amount of something good can exert a positive influence on the whole--whether garlic in your sauce, yeast in your dough, or the presence of kindness in a community--a small amount of something rotten can make the larger whole into a mess, too.  If my kids hang out with friends who swear like elementary-school-aged sailors, I'm going to hear those words coming out of their mouths, too, without fail.  If a family gives a pass to "just a little bit of racism" from their curmudgeonly uncle, everyone else in the family gets the message that that's OK... and it grows and festers.  And--as is the case in Corinth as Paul writes to them--if we let someone continuously treat others as objects rather than people for the sake of their own gratification, it's going to affect all of our relationships to everybody else.  "Sin," to use the church's technical word for it, is rather like putting arsenic in your tea--a little permeates the whole and makes all of it unfit for sipping.  

So here's the conundrum we have to deal with, both as Bible-readers and as Jesus-followers: if small things sometimes influence the whole for good and sometimes influence the whole in bad ways, how do we hold both together in tension?  Jesus, for example, was notorious for hanging out with all the "wrong" types of people--the ones labeled notorious sinners, alongside the sick, the outcast, the unwelcome, and the left out.  He saw that as a crucial part of his mission--after all, as Jesus puts it, the physician is there for the ones who are sick, not for those who are already in good health.  On the other hand, Paul is right, too, that a community can be infected, so to speak, by the presence of rottenness that grows and spreads.  To use our addiction-and-intervention metaphor from yesterday, when a family has someone struggling with addiction and the family doesn't address it eventually, the dysfunction taints everything--it becomes easier to lie about all sorts of things, not just the addiction.  It becomes easier to ignore other destructive habits.  It sets the example for others that the substance abuse doesn't have any meaningful consequences, and it reinforces everybody else's role in the family system keeping things the way they are.  So sometimes you have to confront and even cut off from someone unwilling to get help or make change, not only for the sake the of the person with the addiction, but for the sake of the rest of the family as well, even for generations to come, who will inherit the patterns, habits, and hang-ups that come with our choices in the present.

The challenge is this: the Christian community is called simultaneously to welcome "sinners" [which is all of us], as we are, recognizing that we are indeed stinkers, screw-ups, and sinners... and to call out the behaviors and attitudes that will fester and kill the life of the whole community if left unaddressed.  The old line says that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints--but the point of a hospital is to help people heal from their hurts and recover from their sickness.  And that means being able to say sometimes, "This is not acceptable among the followers of Jesus--it does not reflect the way of love or the Reign of God."  In Corinth, Paul saw the situation with the man who had taken his father's wife as one of those dangerous situations, because it held the seeds of making every relationship into merely a commodification of bodies.  When we start treating one another as interchangeable objects just here for our own gratification, rather than as human beings worthy of time, care, honor, and love, something truly dangerous to community is afoot.  In our time and place, there are going to be plenty of other examples of things that might seem small but which carry the seeds that could choke off good community.  A little bit of racism, a little bit of xenophobia, a little bit of greed, a little bit of apathy... these things all show up at first in little ways we can be tempted to ignore, too.  But Paul would warn us that the things we look the other way about because we don't want to have to deal with them directly are the things that will overtake the whole before long.  A little bit of yeast gets worked through the whole batch of dough--and if you come from a religious tradition like Paul's which celebrated its greatest festival, Passover, with unleavened bread, it was a reminder that the "little" that goes a long way can sometimes be bad.  A little bit of crabgrass will overtake my yard before long.  A little bit of hatred has a way of tainting all of our relationships.  Just because it's uncomfortable to face that truth doesn't mean we are given a pass on dealing with it.

Taking today's verses seriously, alongside Jesus' unwavering call to welcome those labeled as "sinners," is a really difficult thing.  It means constantly living in tension of radical welcome and radical truth-telling.  And to be honest, we are going to mess it up, probably on a regular basis.  We will sometimes be too harsh--and need to come back around to offer unconditional love.  We will sometimes be too quiet about things we need to speak up about--and in those times, need to learn to find our courage and our voices again.  But we don't do any of it alone.  We have not only the presence of one another, but we are given the presence of Jesus, who both welcomes us as we are, and who gives us the example of what courageous truth-telling looks like.  Today's a day to keep our eyes on Jesus, then.

Lord Jesus, keep our eyes on you so that we know how to welcome and to call out one another.