I have a lovely guided meditation for you: What comes to your mind when you hear the word “Mold”? As in fungal rot.

“Mold,” “Fungal Rot,” “Scum”: What are the images and what are the feelings that come to you when you hear these words, what smells and tastes and sensations and emotions? Would you like to do a guided meditation on this?

Now, consider Heaven. What comes to your mind when you hear the word “Heaven”?

What are the images and what are the feelings that come to you when you hear the words “Heaven”? Or “Realm of God”? Or “Kingdom of God”? What sensations? What emotions?

Is there a difference? Is there a difference in your gut response to “Heaven” compared to your gut response to “Mold”? Do those words evoke some strongly contrasting sensations and emotions and images?

When Jesus said, “To what should I compare the Realm of God?” He didn’t say, “It’s like lounging on fluffy white clouds while chubby babies with wings play harps;” he did not say “It’s like a land where all your dreams come true,” some kind of fancy spa resort.

No, Jesus said, “Heaven is like fungal rot.”  

Jesus said, “To what should I compare the Realm of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and concealed in three measures of flour until it was all leavened.” – Luke 13:20-21

When we first hear this we may think, “Well, Jesus is just saying that heaven is like a mother’s homemade bread. That’s nice.” Or “This is just another way that Jesus is saying that the Realm of God starts small and by faith grows big.”

But we need to know that in Jesus’ time, the image of “yeast” or “leaven” was used only in a negative way, only in the sense of mold, a fungal rot that spreads corruption, a bad apple that spoils the bunch. The other times Jesus himself uses the word in the Gospels he uses it in this negative sense to condemn the bad influence and hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducess (Matt. 16:12, Luke 12:1). The Apostle Paul also uses “yeast” negatively, to mean moral corruption (1 Cor 5:7, Gal 5:9). And remember, one of the holiest Jewish holidays, Passover, is celebrated with unleavened bread. Unleavened bread came to be a symbol for what is pure and holy; bread leavened by yeast came to represent what is impure and profane.

Yeast is mold, after all. It’s a fungal growth. It’s scum that spreads in damp dough that’s been left out a few days. Scum.

Jesus meant to provoke disgust.

Moreover, remember that women at that time were not supposed to be handling sacred objects. That’s for the elite men of the priestly caste in the temple. Women were unclean when it comes to holy things.

This is still true in many cultures today:

What happens when a Catholic nun dares to celebrate the Eucharist?

What happens when a Seventh Day Adventist minister comes out as a trans woman?

They have hell to pay. There’s a lot at stake in keeping very strong boundaries around who gets to be close to what is holy, around who and what is pure and worthy, and who and what is not.

 It’s a scandal for Jesus to suggest that the holiest of holies on earth is like an unclean person handling a profane substance for the sake of a daily necessity.

That scandal is purposeful for Jesus. Jesus is trying to show us something very important about God and God’s Realm.

To explore this, let’s talk about disgust.

Disgust is a very strong emotion. And disgust is a very important emotion to reflect and pray on, especially for people who seek to be people of good faith and good conscience. Because disgust can lead us to make knee-jerk judgments that can deny the dignity and humanity of our fellow children of God.

First, disgust does have a helpful role in our survival. Disgust can tell us that something is not good to eat because it’s rotten or rancid, teaming with bacteria that could make us really sick or kill is.

Ugh! Ew! Gross! Get that away from me!

This is an important, evolved response, an inheritance from our ancestors that helped them not die, and can help us not die.

But anyone who has ever fixed dinner for a kid knows that disgust is not always an accurate response.

“Ugh! Ew! Gross! Get that away from me!” Sorry kid, good try, but you’re going to eat these fresh veggies, because they’re good for you. Don’t act like it’s rancid roadkill raccoon.

It’s significant how disgust can be culturally specific. People who grow up in Asian countries tend to react with disgust to the fermented cheeses and yogurts found in European and African and Middle-eastern cultures ; while people from European ancestry tend to find Asian fermented fish and shrimp disgusting (unless they’re from Iceland in which case they enjoy the delicacy of fermented shark, which to anyone not from that island elicits the kind of reaction you get when you open a janitor’s closet and get hit with ammonia spilled on a dirty mop.)

Our bodies don’t trust the micro-organisms that they haven’t learned are safe. The gut response is disgust. But that disgust may not actually mean that the kimchee or blue cheese in front of us is not actually safe to eat. It may just mean that we haven’t gotten used to it. Or that it’s just not for us.

An important thing about disgust is that it often has a moral dimension for us. Our gut response to rancid roadkill raccoon is often more than just a neutral, “Well, here is something that’s among the things I’m not going to choose to eat.” Disgust has a bigger charge than that, an emotional rejection that can feel moral: “How dare this horrid thing even exist!”

That’s not how the scavengers and decomposers of the world feel about the rancid roadkill raccoon that is a feast to them. Thank God for that, or else nothing would ever decompose.

 When it comes to our sense of morality, disgust can also work the other way around. Not only can we tend to feel that things we find disgusting are in some way also immoral, but also things we find immoral can also feel to us to be disgusting. When we think about the worst things that that people can do to each other, truly horrible heinous crimes, we feel disgust.

This is important to honor, our gut rejection of what is terribly immoral.

But it is also important to reflect critically about this.

Because our disgust at someone heinously immoral is not the reason we know it’s wrong. We have much better reasons for knowing that certain kinds of ways of treating other beings are wrong.

But too often people make the mistake of thinking that because we often react to moral atrocities with disgust therefore somehow everything we happen to find disgusting is for that reason immoral.

That’s rotten logic. You see that?

Someone’s disgust at something does not prove the immorality of it. And even worse than that, people can then use the moralizing of their disgust to try to create shame and justify injustice. 

 The example of this I think a lot about has to do with something that may be sensitive and hit close to home for some of us here.

Homophobia, for example, often has its root in disgust. People use disgust born of prejudice to justify denying LGBTQ+ folks their humanity and dignity.

But in fact, disgust gives you no objective moral information. At most it may mean something is not for you. But it often can be the irrational product of a prejudiced upbringing.

People who are very racist find the reality of inter-racial partnerships disgusting. Someone’s disgust is not a good indicator of whether their moral beliefs are any good. We need to use other ways of figuring out what is right and wrong.

Disgust in fact often actively interferes with treating people in a moral and dignified and Christian way. For example, nurses and doctors and caregivers and emergency workers and therapists all have trained themselves out of their initial reactions to what may first seem unpleasant, so they can respond in a caring and helpful way and indiscriminate way to the urgent needs of the people in their care.

I hope this is helpful in exploring why Jesus would commit the scandal of suggesting that the holiest of holies on earth is like an unclean person handling a profane substance for the sake of a daily necessity. He was challenging, provoking folks to move past the ways we can have a gut rejection of people. Jesus was all about taking the people who are rejected and putting them in the center of how we find the Sacred on earth. We all are enriched by this.

Yeast is in fact a great and wonderful kind of fungal growth, which, fortunately a lot people through history have appreciated and have figured out how to use to make bread and beer and wine and vinegar and all kinds of other fermented foods, things that give life some fizz.

On this World Communion Sunday, we have the opportunity to recognize that the body of Christ is leavened by those people and those parts ourselves that have been rejected and scorned. Christ guides us to see the sacredness in who and what has been rejected, and how, like yeast, when respected for their gifts and given healthy conditions with which to grow, they can become leavening for the Body of Christ.

For this I give thanks to God.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, October 1, 2023 by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge

Image: Lies Thru a Lens , CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons