Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
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So there’s this woman and she’s in a kitchen. She’s got flour out — three whole measures of it! That’s a bushel. Sixteen five-pound bags. She’s not just preparing dinner for a few people. She’s preparing a feast for an entire village.
She takes a fistful of yeast and works it down into the middle of all that flour. Mixes it all in. You couldn’t find it now if you wanted to. Then she covers the bowl, wipes her hands, and walks out of the room.
That’s the story. And to that, Jesus says: this is what God’s reign is like.
I mean, He’d already set the bar low. Somebody asked what the kingdom of heaven is like and He said: a mustard seed. In other words, an invasive weed. And in Jerusalem during Jesus’ day, mustard plants were big, gnarly bushes that gardeners lost sleep over. If you were starting a religion, you wouldn’t talk about how invisible it was, and you definitely wouldn’t go with the example of an invasive bush. But there it is.
Notice that the woman leaves. She doesn’t stand over the bowl, checking it every ten minutes like I would. The dough rises in the dark, in an empty kitchen, with nobody watching.
Now, let’s cut over to Solomon from our Old Testament reading today.
God shows up in a dream and essentially says, “Your wish is my command.” And Solomon (brand new on the throne, his father barely in the ground) says: I’m only a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in.
In other words: I have no idea how to lead my people.
I don’t think he’s just being humble. I think he’s super self-aware, especially at such a young age.
And God is delighted and points out what Solomon didn’t ask for: long life, riches, the death of his enemies. Look at that list. Every single item is something you could see, point at, count, and control.
Instead, Solomon asks for a listening heart. And God gives it to him at night, in a dream, while he’s asleep and not looking.
What’s great about this is he never grows out of it. Forty years later, Solomon is still someone who doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. The difference is, he finally stopped pretending he was. That’s the wisdom.
Paul says the same thing: we don’t know how to pray as we ought. He doesn’t say, “We pray the wrong way.” He says we don’t know how. And it’s fine, because the Spirit is doing it anyway, underneath our imperfect prayers, in groans too deep for words. Like the yeast and the buried treasure and the mustard seeds, even our praying is hidden from us. The Spirit moves and works in things we can’t see and in ways we can’t recognize.
How does this hit the ground with you?
Maybe you raised your kids the best you knew how. You brought them to church—a good, loving, grace-soaked place of worship. And now they don’t attend, and you have no idea whether any of it took. You might never know.
Or maybe you’ve prayed for the same person for a decade. And as far as you can tell, the needle hasn’t moved one bit for them.
Or maybe you sit across from a spouse who doesn’t know your name anymore, and you talk to them anyway, and you can’t tell if one word of it lands.
The examples and anecdotes are endless...
You marched. You voted. You gave. You argued with your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving. And you turn on the news and you’re seriously wondering whether that arc that everyone says is supposed to bend toward justice is really bending at all.
And, sure, the elephant in the room now: you got a pastor, you started to trust him, maybe even like him :) and he’s leaving.
And the flip side of that, from my end of the story, I got called to an amazing church but the winds of life are moving me on. And I don’t know what kind of church I’ll be called to next.
Right now, I have an 18 yo niece in the hospital in Reno because she was riding her motorcycle on the highway and a dump truck illegally pulled out in front of her. She got care-flighted to the hospital. Concussion. Brain bleed. Broken pelvis. Though she’s lucky to be alive, and the doctors say she’ll come out of this okay, she’s got a lot of healing left to do. She’s still non-responsive for the most part.
Every one of these examples is the same pattern. God working in the dark. The unknown. The uncertain.
We hate this, so we squint. We strain. We take inventory and try to read the tea leaves. We try to calculate the future out of the available evidence, because if we could just see it, we could stop being afraid of it.
That’s what Solomon probably almost asked God for, but didn’t.
And that’s the thing about the yeast. It’s not hidden for now, like a delay before the big reveal. Hiddenness is how God does absolutely everything. You can never see the yeast once it’s in the mix. But the dough was always going to rise in the dark. We don’t know why, but apparently, it’s how God works.
We despair when we try to figure out God’s process. But the good news is captured wonderfully by Paul today in his famous letter to the Romans.
His words take me back to a very specific time and place. A few years ago, I was a chaplain at the Washoe County Detention Center in Reno. My supervisor and I baptized over a hundred people there in that year. We’d go to the shower, a guard standing by, and I’d pour water over their heads and mark their foreheads with oil in the shape of a cross.
And right before the water, every time, I’d say this (I’d slightly edit to the second person to personalize it):
Who will separate you from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things you are more than a conqueror through him who loves you. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
These people were awaiting trial and possibly transfer to prison.
And I don’t know what happened to a single one of them. Not one. I don’t know who got convicted, who got out, or who’s still alive. I poured the water, I said the words, I crossed their foreheads with oil, and then, I went home.
So, I guess... I folded in the yeast and walked out of the room.
We’re not able to see God working. Not in our kids, not in our marriages, not in our prayers, not in this country, not here in this church.
But Paul wants to remind us: There is no charge against us. The prosecutor’s chair is empty. The one person entitled to sit in it is inside the detention center setting the captives free without unlocking one set of handcuffs. The saving work is happening deep in the prisoner’s hearts. But even with that, the most highly sophisticated angiogram won’t detect it. It’s hidden.
Now, please know this. The captives aren’t just in cells at detention centers. They’re sitting on pews and standing behind pulpits. And they’ve been set free, but they don’t even know it because it’s all hidden work that can’t be seen. It can only be trusted. This is faith.
So let me tell you what you actually are, down there in the dark where you can’t see it. You’re not just a captive. You’re the treasure in God’s field that He found and sold everything for. The interesting thing about the treasure is it can’t see itself. Again, we’re back to the theme of hiddenness.
The treasure has no idea a man just sold everything he owns to buy the ground it’s lying in. It just lies there in the dark, worth more than the whole field, not knowing.
In a minute, Jesus will invite you to His table where you’ll be given bread and wine. They look like the most common things ever. Nothing fancy. But hidden in them is the realest thing there is: God’s full presence... His body and blood... Given for you. Working in the quiet recesses of your heart, in the dark, just as it has been all along.
Amen.
Needed this today. Thanks!