I preached this sermon yesterday, August 6, 2006. Some changes were made as I delivered it, but this was the basic text of the sermon.

Today’s biblical text is Mark 8.1-21. [1]

For those who don’t know me, I’d like to make a brief introduction. My name is Tyler Watson. My wife Carey and I have been attending Pasadena Covenant Church since November of last year. I recently graduated from Fuller with a Master of Divinity and my wife recently received her MD from USC—she has since begun a residency in obstetrics and gynecology also at USC. I am currently pursuing ordination in the Evangelical Covenant Church. The historical and growing emphases on spiritual formation and mission are a couple of the aspects of the denomination and this church in particular that have resonated greatly with Carey and I. The marriage between mission and spiritual formation is something that I’m currently exploring in my internship here. And spiritual formation is what I’m going to talk about today. The full title of my sermon is, “Bread, Fish, a Boat, and Yeast, or: It’s 10:30 in the Morning, Do We Know What Shapes Us?” It’s a long title, but I figure that if Charlie got a long title last week, I could too.

Let’s dig into the story. To mix things up, let’s start at the end of our story. Picture the disciples sitting in the boat. Jesus stands before them. He warns them about the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod, which strikes them as a bit odd since neither the Pharisees nor Herod are known for their baking. One of the Twelve, let’s say Thaddeus because we don’t hear much from poor old Thaddeus in the Gospels, is holding the single loaf of bread they have on the boat. And that one loaf of bread that Thaddeus has in his hand is the only thing they can think of that has any connection to Jesus’ comment about yeast. Jesus says to them, “You guys don’t get it. Your hearts are hardened to the truth in front of you. You see me but you don’t see. You listen to what I say, but you don’t hear me. Don’t you remember anything? When I broke the five loaves for five thousand people, how many baskets did you pick up?” James, son of Alpheus—we don’t hear much from this James either—says, “Twelve.” Then Jesus says, “When I broke the seven loaves for the crowd of four thousand, how many baskets of broken leftovers did you pick up?” Bartholomew says, “Seven.” Then Jesus says, “Don’t you get it?”

And we’re left hanging. That’s it. Jesus has asked his disciples, “You’ve hung out with me, you’ve heard my teachings, you’ve seen these miracles, you’ve even participated in my ministry—don’t you get it yet?” What are the disciples, and what are we as readers supposed to understand? Doesn’t the tension just eat at you? What was it that we’re supposed to pick up from these stories?

I think we can look at these stories through the lens of Christian spiritual formation. Quickly defined, I believe that Christian spiritual formation is the process in which God shapes communities or persons into embodying God’s character as well as greater participation with God and God’s kingdom. This shaping happens through several different avenues such as mission, service, Bible study, community life, prayer, hospitality, worship, fasting, and other disciplines. Some of the most important things I’ve learned about spiritual formation is that we are always being shaped and it is messy. The question about spiritual formation is not if it is happening, but how is it happening, and who or what is doing the shaping?

Let’s jump back a bit to the beginning of the story. We know the nuts and bolts. Jesus has been teaching a crowd for three days and now that he’s done, the crowd needs to go home. But they’re out in the wilderness and there is a shortage of food. To send them away without food would be irresponsible and even dangerous. So Jesus does a very Jesusy thing: he takes a few loaves of bread and a few fish, he gives thanks to God and blesses them, and then he breaks these elements up. Notice that Jesus has the disciples distribute the food and collect the abundance of leftovers. I don’t think that this is merely a pragmatic choice on Jesus’ part. Obviously it would have taken him much longer to do the work himself, but I think that Jesus is consistently discipling the Twelve. He here is showing them what it means to be one of his followers. Service is not an elective course in Christian discipleship. Rather, it is at the very heart of discipleship. A commentator notes that in the earlier similar story of the feeding of the five thousand in Mark 6.30-44, Jesus has compassion on the crowd, recognizes their need, that they don’t have a leader, and he teaches them—the feeding there is something of an addendum. Here, Jesus has compassion on the crowd, recognizes their need, which is food, and feeds them. [2] Part of being a disciple is having compassion for people around us. Sometimes that compassion will manifest itself in telling others our stories and what we know; sometimes it will mean providing those very basic human needs such as food. But serving in both manners are equally spiritually formative activities.

Jesus has performed yet another spectacular miracle in which he feeds a multitude with a little bit of food. Afterward, he and the disciples get in a boat and cross the lake. On the other shore, the Pharisees meet him. The Pharisees are the guardians of a specific view of God and God’s Scriptures and they have already clashed with Jesus several times in Mark by the time we read this encounter. They demand a sign, some kind of miracle from Jesus to prove that his teachings on God’s Scriptures are true. I love the irony here. If the Pharisees had been with Jesus just a few hours earlier, they would have witnessed a terrific miracle. I don’t know how you picture Jesus in this situation, but I can almost imagine him throwing his hands up in the air and asking exasperatedly, “What do you want from me?” Other times I can imagine Jesus hearing their demands and standing there in silent shock and muttering under his breath, “You’ve got to be kidding me. What do you think I was just doing?” But let’s not miss the point: there is something important in this very brief encounter that Jesus wants his disciples to remember. There is something in the Pharisees’ attitude towards Jesus that he sees as dangerous and needing a warning.

So here we are again, in the boat with Jesus and the disciples. Boats seem to be one of the only places Jesus can get the disciples alone and teach them directly and this is no exception to that pattern. Here Jesus issues that strange warning to his disciples about the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod.

We all know what yeast does, right? It makes bread rise.

Carey and I love using our bread maker. Even though making a warm loaf of bread couldn’t be easier with the appliance, we’ve managed to make some mistakes, usually in measuring the ingredients. Most small mistakes go unnoticed. A bit too much flour or salt isn’t the end of the world. But mess up on the yeast measurement and you have a disaster on your hands. We’ve added too much yeast so that a loaf of bread smells like a bottle of beer. We’ve added too little yeast so that we get a dense brick of wheat flour that expands like a sea monkey in your stomach when you drink water along with it. Old yeast yields similar results as having too little yeast. Yeast is an amazing crucial little ingredient. Just a little spreads through an entire loaf of bread, giving it the characteristics of a good, healthy, and delicious loaf. Bad yeast, on the other hand, can ruin a whole loaf.

I think that the metaphor of yeast that Jesus uses is pure genius. The influence of the Pharisees and Herod is like yeast. In fact, the influence that everyone possesses is like yeast. Just as we don’t notice the yeast when we bite into a piece of bread, we rarely notice the influence that others, that our neighbors, that our society has on us. It could be good yeast that forms us to be more Christ-like. It could be bad yeast that shapes us into more selfish and callous people. Everyone, everything we encounter shapes us—everyone has yeast. [3] As I said before, it’s not a matter of if they shape us, but who is shaping us, how are they shaping us, and what are they shaping us into? We are surrounded by spiritually formative forces all the time. It’s like we’re fish swimming in a sea of spiritual formation. And as a professor of mine would like to ask, “How do we get the fish to talk about the water?”

When we think of influential forces in our lives, what immediately comes to mind? Family. Friends. Neighbors. Coworkers. School curriculum. Television. Movies. Music. Books. Church. What else? How does the fact that this building sits in Pasadena on Lake Avenue influence the character of our community? How does the fact that we live in a nation at war affect this congregation and our personal lives? How does the historically Swedish and missionary nature of the Evangelical Covenant Church affect us here and now? How does our market-based economy shape our relationships with God and with others? We live in the greater Los Angeles area and we spend large amounts of time in our cars commuting from one place to another—how does that aspect of Southern California life shape us? In what ways do our Peace and Justice ministries such as the Bad Weather Shelter, the Elizabeth House, the food closet, and our ongoing relationship with the Church of the Redeemer form this congregation? I really don’t know the answer to these questions, but I know that these different forces are shaping us. To put it in Jesus’ terms, each of these things has yeast. The media has yeast. Our history as a congregation has yeast. Our political leaders have yeast. Our friends have yeast. God has yeast. And all this yeast works into our lives and shapes us, affects us on every level as human beings. We don’t even need to be aware that it’s happening for it to shape us. Oftentimes, we aren’t aware that it’s happening.

Sermons are often considered an important aspect of the Christian life. We can say sermons have yeast. How many sermons have you heard in your lifetime? How many do you remember? I’m going to guess that you don’t remember most of them. I certainly don’t remember the majority of the sermons I’ve heard. The odds are that you won’t consciously remember this sermon in the future. I may not even remember it that well. My parents might remember the sermon because they’re taping it. Yet every sermon we’ve heard has affected us and continues to affect us in one way or another. Some sermons certainly shape us more than others, which is to be expected. Just the fact that we’ve joined together to worship God this morning shapes us. The Holy Spirit is here doing something as we read these stories and consider them together. Something formative is happening. We may not see the fruit for a long time. When we see the fruit, we may not even be aware that it comes from this morning, but the fact remains that we are being formed all the time, including right now.

In Mark’s Gospel, despite their request for a sign, the Pharisees have actually seen several of Jesus’ miracles. They’ve heard him teach. But they don’t get what Jesus is about. I think that the lack of discernment on the part of the Pharisees is the yeast that Jesus warns his disciples about. I don’t think it’s a mistake that on the Sea of Galilee that Jesus warns against the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod. The Pharisees were the religious power in that region and Herod was the political power. Their respective influence shaped the region in very obvious and very subtle ways. What are the religious and political forces in our context that give shape to the playing field and determine the conversation in our society, and how should we interact with them?
What do we do in the face of such great forces? We can be passive and just follow the flow or be attracted the strongest or most tantalizing influences at any given time. We can try to be avoidant. There has always been a strong stream within the Christian family that wants to remove itself from anything that it sees as possibly dangerous, that might jeopardize peoples’ holiness. Or we can be aware of the different influences around us and we can discern how they shape us. We can actively engage, seeking the good yeast in things and being aware of the bad yeast. Jesus and the disciples continue to interact with the Pharisees, but they do so with caution. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus actually affirms some of the Pharisees’ teachings, but he warns against their hypocrisy. Jesus is able to discern between the good and bad in the Pharisees.

Our story in Mark confronts us with another tension. Jesus expects that the disciples would be formed by participating in his ministry. Yet here on the boat, it doesn’t seem like Jesus’ method of discipleship is all that successful. The disciples don’t get “it,” and they don’t even know what “it” is that they’re supposed to understand. And it’s not like the disciples understand most of what Jesus wants them to know and they just need to work out the kinks. No, Jesus tells them that they don’t have a clue. “Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember?” (vv.17-21) The eyes, the ears, and the heart: in Jesus’ time and place, these were the organs of understanding, they were thought to be the parts of the human that interacted with their surroundings. If they’re not working or are not working correctly, the person wouldn’t be able to understand or piece together all the input around them. Jesus tells the disciples all three of these “zones of interaction” don’t work for them. [4] In some ways it would be like trying to explain electricity to a penguin—the penguin would have no means of understanding what you’re getting at. Here is the tension. It is Jesus himself who has been teaching the disciples—they don’t receive the information second-hand. So often I think that I wish I could have walked around with Jesus like the Twelve Apostles did, because then, I think, I would get it and not struggle. Hogwash. Here the disciples have spent loads of time with Jesus and they’re just as clueless as me.

Just because Jesus has been a formative force in the lives of the disciples doesn’t guarantee that the disciples will become more like him. The gospel of Jesus Christ is competing with all the other influences in the disciples’ lives. This fact is a bit disconcerting. One would think that if Jesus can break a few loaves of bread and feed thousands of people, that he would be able to easily shape people, especially those who have already devoted their lives to following him. The life of a disciple isn’t a formula, no matter how much we want to reduce it to a few simple phrases or practices. The outcomes of our discipleship always seem to be in flux. Christian spiritual formation is a fragile and messy process.

Marilynne Robinson has written a tremendous novel, Gilead, which is something of an ongoing letter that John Ames, an Iowan Congregational minister, writes to his young son. Ames tells the story of his father and grandfather as well as offers several thoughts on life, faith, baseball, the ministry, friendship, nature, and nearly anything else. I can’t recommend this Pulitzer Prize winner highly enough. At one point John Ames tells his son of how he instructed his wife in the faith in her early days as a Christian. I think these short paragraphs show both the importance of knowing the yeast others have to offer as well as how delicate and messy Christian spiritual formation actually is. Ames writes:

I thought it best to recruit some of the kindest older women to sit through [your mother’s] instruction with her, and I believe that made her shy about speaking, which I regretted very much.

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. [5]

I think the parents and teachers here can resonate with John Ames’ lament. We can teach and model for others what we believe is right and someone can come along with a flashy presentation and completely undermine all the wisdom we tried to instill in others.

Even though Christian spiritual formation is messy, or to use a more positive term, even though Christian spiritual formation is organic, and the outcomes are not set in stone, we can engage in some practices that positively shape the character of our community, the character of our neighborhoods, the character of our classes, the character of our families, and our own characters. For example, the Holy Spirit has put prayer on the hearts of many in this congregation. Communicating with God as a spiritual practice has become such an important piece of Pasadena Covenant that we’ve committed to bathing the congregation and the decision-making processes in prayer. How has that passion for prayer changed us as a community? If anything, the importance of prayer has continued to increase. We held the Brennan Manning retreat during Lent this year, and I continue to hear stories of how people were shaped by that.

Just a few weeks ago we heard wonderful stories from Danny Martinez about Church of the Redeemer. I was struck by the story about a group of women from Pasadena Covenant who painted the inside of one of Redeemer’s member’s homes and how that act of service changed her negative racial views. That is good news—through a simple act of service, this woman was shaped into a more Christ-like person. How did that act of service shape the women who served the woman in South Central? What have they learned about Jesus through their participation in his ministry?

I know I’ve asked a lot of questions and haven’t given many answers. That’s because I don’t think that these questions can be answered in a single sermon or by a single person. Being aware of the formative forces around us is a communal effort that needs lots of prayer and listening to God, as well as conversation with each other. We aren’t islands in the ocean and we don’t live in a vacuum in which our spirits are formed apart from the rest of the world. Perhaps this sermon is something of an exercise in stating the obvious, but I think that’s okay. So many times I know that I get so involved with my thoughts, my work, my little world, that I am oblivious to the obvious. I think we’ve seen that just because we may not pay attention to the influences in front of our faces doesn’t mean that those influences aren’t shaping us. The good news is that Jesus is also shaping us as a community into becoming a people more like him.

So we may still be on the boat with the disciples. We can attest to Jesus’ actions in our own lives, in the lives of others, and in the life of this community. Can we put the pieces together? Can we understand what God is doing? I pray that we become more aware of God’s actions in our community and in the world, and I also pray that we become better at discerning the influential forces around us; that we would be aware of how they shape us, and that we can seek those forces that shape us into people and into a people more like Jesus Christ.

Today we celebrate communion, a practice of remembering and proclaiming through physical actions Jesus’ life and death. Jesus’ act of breaking the bread and distributing it out to the crowd of four thousand is strikingly similar to Jesus’ action of breaking the bread in the Upper Room and handing it out to his disciples. Jesus commands his disciples to continue this practice after he leaves them. Sometimes these rituals of the Christian faith can feel mechanical or robotic, and we may not give much attention to them. I’ve certainly sat through some communion services and haven’t engaged—I just ate and drank without any real thought or expectation. Let us come to the table today expecting that Jesus will meet us as we take the elements of communion. Let us pray and hope with great expectation that the Father will form us in this holy act of remembrance. Let us look forward to how the Holy Spirit will continue to shape us throughout our week as we remember our participation in this sacred meal.

Amen.

1. All biblical quotations and references come from The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989).
2. William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark, ed. F. F. Bruce, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 272-273.
3. See: Hans Windisch, “ζύμη,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey William Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 2:906.
4. Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 226-227.
5. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Picador, 2004), 208.

Further bibliography:
Hooker, Morna D. The Gospel According to Saint Mark. Black’s New Testament Commentaries, ed. Henry Chackwick. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991.

If you’ve made it this far down, congratulations for now you’ll read about an embarrassing slip of the tongue that happened as I preached yesterday. One of my weaknesses is that I speak rather fast in public and sometimes my words slur together. Yesterday, when I described the “dense brick of wheat flour,” the words “dense” and “brick” formed into one and I ended up saying “dick” in a worship service. That’ll teach me. In the future I’ll be sure to never have the words “funny” and “luck” anywhere near each other in a sermon.