Easter Sunday 2011

Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, 

not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, 
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Bread makers keep a lump of dough from one batch to the next because it contains the germ of yeast. Yeast, of course, is everywhere in the atmosphere but it’s richer and more accessible in last week’s lump of dough. During the Pasch Jewish bakers were instructed to throw out the old lump and begin with a fresh, unleavened batch of dough. Eventually, as they kneaded the dough week after week it would garner yeast out of the atmosphere, but that first Paschal bread was pretty flat.

To this day the Catholic Church uses unleavened bread for our hosts, recalling the fresh, newness of the Pasch.

Saint Paul invokes that ancient practice to describe the new life of the Christian. As the gospel moves from culture to culture and century to century we pick up a lot of alien practices. Many are harmless, (for instance, the photographs at baptisms and first communions); but some contradict the essential ritual and confuse the ceremony, (as does the wedding candle*).

Likewise, every Christian brings some expectations to his faith practice that are really unnecessary. They tell the story of the young American missionary who was offended by the native women suckling their young as he preached. To solve the problem he distributed free t-shirts to his entire congregation. The following week the nursing mothers arrived with large circles cut in their shirts, to suckle their young.

Barbara Kingsolver, in her wonderful novel, The Poisonwood Bible, tells of the missionary who tried valiantly to persuade his people to go down into the river to be baptized. Year after year they politely refused. He was profoundly frustrated because he believed they could not be saved unless they were baptized by immersion in the river. Finally someone told him, “There are crocodiles in that river. We don’t go in there!”

In a Manichean society such as our own, where people believe there are clear and distinct differences between Good and Evil (for instance, that liberal is evil and conservative is good without a clear definition of either word), many people bring a heretical yeast that is thousands of years old. How many attitudes do I carry which simply don’t fit my Christian faith?

During Lent we should have discovered some of them. Some attitudes are deleterious to health and were constrained by Lenten practices. Some superfluous habits were modified by almsgiving. Some laziness was controlled by the practice of prayer. With six weeks of prayer, fasting and abstinence behind us we’re ready to practice a “new normal” which may be freer than Lent but less corybantic than pre-Lenten life.

We rise up like new bread with the yeast of Jesus, fresh and delicious and ready to enrich the world in which we live. 

*P.S. -- (If you're wondering, every sacrament has words and matter, and the sacrament is not complete without both. The wedding candle suggests that the "matter" of the sacrament is the union of two flames, rather than union of the male and female persons.)