Today's Daily Lesson comes from Matthew chapter 13 verse 33:
33 He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”
Some years ago our church had Tony Campolo as our adult retreat leader and he preached on this text and what he called the subversive nature of the kingdom of heaven. He spoke of leaven and how it was always portrayed negatively in the Scriptures -- a metaphor for something to be done away with like a bad apple. Yet here Jesus is speaking of the kingdom being like a woman sneaking it into the flour. In a small group afterward, a perceptive seminary student in church says to us, "So let me get this straight. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a passive aggressive cook?"
The kingdom of God is subversively hidden. It is snuck in in surprising and even unsettling ways. That's why the status quo is so resolutely on guard against -- because just a little of its leaven has the power to leaven the whole loaf.
Here's just a few moments I know of when just a pinch of the kingdom's leaven was first snuck in and then rose to leaven the whole loaf:
-- when two women were ticketed for feeding the homeless in a city park and then the next thing we knew the mayor and about 100 others were down at the park making friends and hotdogs with the homeless
-- when one negro woman in Montgomery, Alabama was a arrested for refusing to give her seat up to a white person and a year later the whole bus system was integrated
-- when a small group of political dissidents in East Germany began sneaking audio-recorded cassettes into West Germany and then broadcasting them back over the wall on a subversive citizen's movement program called Radio Glasnost, meaning "Open Radio".
The kingdom of heaven is small. It is subversive. And it is being hidden in all kinds of ways.
Look for it.
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