If a church claims Jesus, I believe that they must claim his message on the reign of God. Many churches focus on Jesus and saving souls, but I wonder how many of these churches Jesus would claim as his own. Are they what he imagined? Jesus has been transformed into the savior of souls while churches have failed to realize that the story of Jesus is transformative, and that the message he preached is radical and transformative. The gospel of Jesus is a dangerous memory of his priorities and values. I want to make a bold claim that Jesus—God’s Christ—would rather be an example for us to model ourselves upon rather than be worshiped each Sunday without the living the values he held valuable.

Did I really say this? Yes Jesus has been a model for me for most of life, and I followed him by making his values and his priorities my own. You have heard me on a number of occasions describe Jesus as rule-breaker and his indiscriminate eating habits with people who were impure, outcasts, and sinners. Oftentimes, Christian churches present Christianity as shame –based religion, and I wonder what would happen if they could follow Jesus’ spirit of compassion, generosity,forgiveness and kindness and abandon shaming and exclusion as punishments for outsiders. If a church were Christian, they make Jesus’ practice and message of God’s reign. When Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God or God reign, he is speaking about his experience of God in his life and the values of God enfleshed in his ministry. They give us an example of his priorities and values, and these, I would argue, must be central to following Jesus. Many churches have forgotten this because these values of Jesus are too dangerous.

I am going to explore Jesus’ experience of God as subversive and mischievous. God, in fact, is untamed and wild, outside, mischievous, and undomesticated. This does not mean that God is not compassionate and loving. It means our God does the unexpected, the unpredictable, the surprising, and even the unthinkable. God always surprises us.

Let us this morning look at two Jesus’ parables, the mustard seed and the woman who places the unleaven into fifty pounds of flour. These parables tell us much about Jesus’ experience of Abba God but also a lot about himself. I want to suggest that from the beginning Easter was unconsciously built into his parables and actions about God’s reign from the Holy Spirit. The surprise of Easter expresses how God surprises the disciples, and that same God provides surprises in these two parables.

I heard once in class a professor say, “Jesus preached God’s reign, and what we got was the church.” If the church were only Christian as I indicated in my centering prayer reflection…. Church preaching often presumes that it is the focus of Jesus’ preaching, but this is self-serving. Jesus founded a movement but he never intended a church, at least, as many churches are—focused on power and control. Jesus was focused on the wild surprises that God has in store for us. This is certainly a bold claim made by your pastor preaching this morning.

Now the parable of the mustard seed is from today’s scripture. Matthew pairs this parable with the parable of woman who hid the yeast in the unleavened bread. She stealthily place corruption of impure leaven into the flour to make leaven bread. The image includes the woman’s stealthily or secretly adding what is considered impure to the pure. God uses the impure to subvert the pure. This is one of the many images Jesus used for God and how lives and interacts with us.

In Leviticus 19:19, there is a prohibition of not planting two types of seeds in the same field. A mustard seed grows by spreading under all of the other plants. What it does is it spreads so far unseen until it covers under the garden. This is why Jewish gardeners hated it, it just took over, no matter what you did, it went where it wanted to go. (Jeff picture of a field of mustard) It works in small steps with small seeds to slowly but surely take over the garden, unnoticed, from underneath. Each flower on the plant can produce thousands of seeds. The potential of each flower to multiply is incredible, almost wildly unstoppable.

For Jesus, God’s reign is a subversive movement. It takes over like a pesky weed or mustard plant where it is not wanted. God’s reign is a movement of people empowered or what I described earlier as empowered companionship. It is institutionally out of control. It attracts birds which spread the mustard seeds to other locations where it is not particularly desired. The power of love is subversive and dangerous like the mustard seed; the power of God’s love is stronger than the power of violence. And no matter what precautions farmers take, they still cannot stop its spread.

But the mustard plant is not entirely useless; it has medicinal properties for healing. Thus, Jesus points out the main character of God’s reign as empowered companionship. It has dangerous take over properties with medicinal capabilities of healing.

God’s movement is bigger than any church or churches attempt to control God. God lives and acts in the world as a pesky weed with healing properties, uncontrollable with dangerous properties of taking over as well as healing.
We could possibly listen to the parable as one woman spoils the flour with yeast or leaven. It might culturally mean something like this, “one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.” But this parable like the mustard seed is far more dangerous.
Jesus’ audience would have been shocked by his teaching. Some might have blanched. God’s reign is like leaven or yeast. Let me give you the full impact of this metaphor.

In Mark 8:15, Jesus warns his disciples, “Take care, beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” Leaven naturally is corruption, and it makes sense to speak of the leaven of the Pharisees, Herod, or even Caesar. But how can God’s reign be like leaven or corruption or impurity? Paul speaks of the saints, “Clean out the old leaven that you might become fresh dough as you are really unleavened.” (1 Cor. 5:7) To the Jewish audience, leaven is primarily unclean, impure, or corruption. It is banned from the house seven days prior and during the most important festival of Passover. Leaven was yeast, a bacteria that led to the fermentation and the rising of dough. It was a religious symbol of decay and impurity.

A woman took and hid leaven in three measures of flour. Three measures in the ancient world was about fifty pounds. Imagine buying fifty one pound packages of flour at the supermarket. That is probably more flour than all of us use in a year—except for Layne he goes through fifty pounds of flour every two weeks.
The parable was even more offensive as it starts. How can a weak woman have anything to do with God? That’s a male domain. How can the woman keep it concealed? Most bread in the ancient world was flat bread: like Syrian bread, pita bread, or tortillas. How long before the men realize that this bread is leavened, rising, and expanding? Fifty pounds of dough rising and expanding could get of out of hand quickly. Imagine all the bread that would be made.

But Jesus parable would be radical his hearers to imagine and conceive of God first as a baker woman. God stealthily is working to expand God’s banquet into a huge messianic feast to include all peoples, pure and so- called impure.
Jesus’ metaphor of God as a baker woman does place God not out there but very close to us, hidden and unrecognized as She pulls us, kneads us into shape, maybe even slamming the dough on a board. It is not a very comfortable process for us. And then the baker woman God places us in an oven—a fire—perhaps a refining fire that gives heat and energy. Then the baker woman God blesses us, breaks us, and gives us to others. It is not easy being shaped as dough and baked into a leavened loaf of bread. The broken and shared leavened loaf becomes nourishment for others.

But this parable presents good news to women, for it gives women a major role in God’s reign and the fact that they also bear the image of God as women. Women are naturally impure because their monthly cycle from the perspective of the Hebrew Bible. But Jesus’ radical story does not end with the imaging of God as a baker woman.

He associates God with leaven, yeast—a bacteria that represents decay and fermentation. The baker woman introduces leaven until all the dough has become leavened, In other words, the dough is thoroughly corrupted. The baker woman corrupts the purity of the unleavened.

For Jews, leaven was impurity, a symbol of moral evil. Unleaven is the proper religious symbol for God. For pious Jews, they aimed to be holy as God is holy. Now Jesus has turned the religious symbol of unleaven upside down. For the Hebrew scriptures, unleavened bread symbolically represented holiness. He has perverted the symbol, turning it inside out and upside down.

Jesus has subverted the whole religious order within the eyes of all the Jewish holiness groups: scribes, Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Temple priests. Jesus’ one sentence parable redefines the God. God becomes unclean. No wonder the charges of the chief priests of the Temple before Pilate: “We found this man (Jesus) perverting our nation…” That is a remarkable charge. He has corrupted or leavened our religion, what we consider sacred.
Imagine the radicalness of this parable, for it abolishes the category of pure and impure, sacred and profane. Those map grids are human categories to build a fence around some folks and fence out others. It justifies religious practices, regulates grace. Religious or grace gatekeepers are terrified by the image that Jesus preaches. What will happen to our specialness, our special holy relationship with God? We control accessibility to God. It is the scandal of radical inclusiveness—what if we are all included in the banquet.

Jesus told parables to allow people to see God as he experienced God. For women, this parable is good news for them. They are like the baker God and carry that image in themselves. On one level, this parable states clearly, God’s reign is impurity, it corrupts and makes impure. How righteous persons object to this bold proclamation of Jesus! I pointed this out in a meeting of clergy once, and one MCC clergy was so upset with me that I dare name God corruption. God is perceived as corruption when the religious system has become too narrow, fundamentalist, and exclusive. Ironically, it is corrupt! Corrupting the corrupting is like my definition of queer in the queer theology I write. People, especially of an older generation, object to the word “queer” because it was used as abusive epithet against themselves by homophobes. But if we go to an English dictionary: queer as verb means “to spoil or interfere with” For those who have found themselves outside of the church because of sexual orientation or gender differences or even as women who thought themselves as equal to men, or divorced and remarried couples. To spoil an exclusive system that is already spoiled for themselves is a good thing. It is to place leaven into the flour. Here Jesus uses a similar type of speech to pervert an already corrupted vision of God and Jewish religion based on purity codes.

The parable also explains Jesus’ blatant disregard for religious purity codes. Jesus becomes a friend of the unclean, outcasts, lepers, sinners, and women. These throw-away people find themselves accepted as friends of God without the religious need to become clean or pure. Jesus imagined God as baker woman; he understood God’s reign covertly happening and subverting how we conceive the divine. He also knew that his movement to present God anew would spread like pesky weed with healing properties.