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Like a Woman Who Took Some Yeast

Posted by on Sunday, July 26th, 2026 in Minister, News

Watch sermon video here:

https://youtu.be/sZvyOJ9JVRw

Crieff, 26 July, 2026 © Scott McAndless – Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 18:1-8, Psalm 128, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

This morning we read six of Jesus’ parables. Six short little stories that seem to be about the most ordinary things – planting a seed, baking some bread, going jewelry shopping. Obviously, Jesus liked telling parables a lot. But why did he like them so much?

Was it because he was such a great storyteller and loved to spin a good tale? Oh, I am sure that he enjoyed the storytelling process, but he had a deeper purpose in telling them. You see, each little story was packed with all the wisdom his disciples needed to live out the reality of the kingdom of God successfully. Each and every one of them.

19-Word Story

Now I can see that some of you are looking at me very doubtfully. Some of these stories are really short, and they all seem to be focused on quite ordinary and everyday things. Take the parable about an ordinary person making ordinary bread. That “story” is only 25 words long in English. It is even shorter, only 19 words, in the original Greek. War and Peace it is not!

And here this preacher is trying to tell us that, in those 19 words, Jesus lays out an entire program for us to follow in this world to establish God’s kingdom. Well, he is going to have to show me some proof before I accept that.

Well, if that is how you feel, then challenge accepted. Let’s look at some of those 19 words and see just how much Jesus is saying to us in the careful choice of them.

Woman

Let’s take the word “γυνὴ” for example. That was the common Greek word for a woman (the word that we get words like “gynocologist” and “misogyny” from). And let us pause at that word for a moment to notice that Jesus made the main character of this story a woman. To tell a story from the point of view of a woman is hardly a shocking thing today, but it was in Jesus’ time. So, let’s assume he didn’t do that lightly.

When people interpret the parables of Jesus, they often make the assumption that the main character represents God. Now, I am not entirely sure that people are always right to do that, but it is a tendency we have.

Imagining God as a Woman

But here’s something I have noticed: I’ve never heard anybody do it with this parable. But why not? Why wouldn’t Jesus have been inviting his listeners to imagine God as a bread-baking woman? And why might we have problems accepting that he might have done so?

In this one word, we have a very important teaching about Jesus’ understanding of how the kingdom of God spreads. Whether the woman in the parable was meant to represent God or not, she certainly represented someone who was not normally given agency or power in that world.

Jesus is teaching us that the kingdom does not require the influence of powerful people to spread. In fact, he’s letting us know that God loves to use the forgotten, the powerless and the outsiders to spread that message in powerful ways. So, whenever we complain that we don’t have the power or influence to have an impact on the world, remember who the main character of this parable of Jesus was.

Yeast

The next word I want to look at is the word yeast or ζύμῃ in Greek. Yeast is an incredible organism. It can take a flat, hard pile of dough and turn it into a light and fluffy loaf. It is the secret ingredient that turns grape juice into fine wine and mash into beer. Together with bacteria, it can also turn milk into yogurt and cheese. Life without yeast would be a miserable existence indeed!

And the people of Jesus’ world appreciated all of that about yeast. But they also had some mixed feelings about it. For yeast was forbidden in Jewish households during the season of Passover according to the law. And so, Jews like Jesus knew very well how pervasive it was.

During Passover, they would have to clean their houses from top to bottom, going deep into every crack and crevice. They knew all too well that yeast had a way of getting everywhere and into everything. They knew exactly how hard it was to get rid of it.

What Jesus Was Saying

So, what do you suppose that Jesus might have been saying about us and about how we can represent the kingdom of God on earth by saying that it is like yeast? I think that, a lot of the time, we fall into the assumption that, for the church to accomplish anything, it has to be big, and it has to be able to use a lot of influence and have connections to people in power.

But if the kingdom is like yeast, that gives us a very different perspective on what we can do. Yeast is added only in small amounts, yet its transformative power is massive. It can pervade and transform a huge amount of dough. How much dough? Well, actually the amount is literally unlimited, as we will see in a moment.

The church doesn’t have to be big to have an impact. It just has to be like yeast. Rather than size, we should be concentrating on infiltrating, bringing life and hope to every bit of dough we encounter. And when we do that, we will discover that, just like yeast in a Jewish household at Passover, the church will be very hard to eliminate from society.

Mixed

But then we come to our next word. It has to do with what the woman does with the yeast. In our English translation, it says she “mixed” the yeast with the dough, but I am here to tell you today that this is not what it says in the original Greek.

The word that is translated as mixed is ἐνέκρυψεν, and that doesn’t mean mixed. It is actually the Greek word that we get words like encryption and cryptocurrency from. It means to hide something. So the woman didn’t mix in the yeast; Jesus said that she hid it in the dough.

That word choice is clearly not an accident. Jesus often described the kingdom of God as something hidden or secret, like, for example, when he said it was like a treasure hidden in a field.

A Hidden Kingdom

So, what does that word, “hid,” teach us about being faithful citizens of the kingdom of heaven today? Well, we live in a world that is largely oriented around attention. If you want to be considered a success these days, you must get a lot of people to pay a lot of attention to you. That seems to be the entire basis of our celebrity culture, our politics and 90% of our social media.

And it is easy for the church to get sucked into that attention culture. We judge our success by how many people are noticing what we are doing. But Jesus understood that attention is not just an end in itself. We are called to bring about transformation, not to get attention. It is through acts of mercy, love and kindness, which are carried out without seeking attention, that we will have the greatest impact on the spread of the kingdom of God.

Measure

The next word I want to look at in this short parable is the word translated as measure. Now, when you read that a woman “mixed” some yeast with three “measures” of flour, how big do you imagine that “measure” to be? I always assumed that we were talking about something about the size of a cup. I mean, with three cups of flour you could probably make a decent loaf of bread.

But the word that is used in this parable does not mean a cup. Nor is it the common everyday Greek word for measure, which would be μέτρον (the word we get meter from). No, the word that is used in this passage is not even a Greek word, but it refers to a specific quantity of flour.

A Hebrew Measurement

Jesus says that the woman took three σάτα of flour. And σάτα is a common Hebrew measure that is used in the Old Testament.

The fact that a Hebrew word appears here is significant because Jesus didn’t speak Greek; he spoke Aramaic, a language closely related to Ancient Hebrew. So, it seems the Gospel writer has translated this entire parable into Greek except for this one word. And I wanted to know why. I hope the reason blows your mind as much as it did mine.

Σάτα is the plural for a Hebrew word for a specific quantity equivalent to 7.3 liters. Think about that for a moment. This woman didn’t take three cups of flour; she took three times 7.3 liters of flour. That is… almost 22 liters of flour. Since we normally buy flour by weight, we are talking about maybe 14 kg of unsifted flour. That is about as heavy as two 10-pin bowling balls.

That’s A Lot of Dough

I have a few questions. How much bread is this woman baking? With 14 kg of flour, I could easily make about 25 loaves of bread. How many peanut butter sandwiches could you make with 25 loaves of bread?

So, what does this tell us about being part of the kingdom of God in this world? It tells us that we might be very small – like a small little bit of live yeast – but we can have a huge impact. But that impact does not come in the form of influence or power. I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where Jesus tells us to pursue those things. It comes in the form of service.

Same Amount as Sarah

But there is one more thing I want you to note about the amount of flour the woman takes. It is exactly the same amount of flour that Abraham tells his wife Sarah to take in our reading from Genesis this morning. And that, I assure you, is not a coincidence.

When three strangers turn up in front of Abraham’s tent, he makes them a seemingly limited offer of hospitality. “My lord,” he says, “if I find favour with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves.”

But then Abraham goes and immediately tells his wife to take three measures – three σάτα – of flour. He tells her to make cakes with what we have established are 14 kg of flour. He also slaughters and cooks an entire calf and makes soft cheese for his guests.

Not Very Practical

Now, such an extravagant meal doesn’t seem very practical. I mean, there is no way that three strangers would eat 25 loaves worth of cheese sandwiches and an entire calf. And how long would they have had to wait for all that food to be prepared? But the practicality is not the point of the story. It is simply an illustration of hospitality that is so extreme that it borders on the ridiculous.

And I suggest to you that it is no mistake that Jesus refers to the same extreme amount of flour in this short parable. The promise in that story in Genesis is that when we practice extreme hospitality, we will encounter God. Because, of course, in case you didn’t know, those three strangers that Abraham offered hospitality to turned out to be God.

Practicing Hospitality

So, what is Jesus promising us with this parable? He is promising that if we practice hospitality as a church, if we welcome people just as they are and no matter where they are coming from with kindness and generosity, something amazing will happen. We will know the presence of God among us. And that, more than anything else, is how the kingdom of God will be made real among us.

So, we have this one parable, and in only 19 words it teaches us so much that we need to learn about the spread of the kingdom of God. What have we learned?

Lessons of the Kingdom

We have learned that the kingdom of God is led by the very people that the world has discounted, that it may be small like yeast, but it also spreads and infiltrates like yeast and is even harder to get rid of. We have learned that it is hidden – that it does not seek attention – but that it has the greater impact on society for that reason.

And we have learned that it is like 14 kg of flour – that it is never cheap or restricted when it comes to reaching out. And, most of all, we have learned that our practice of hospitality towards all is what is going to drive the growth of the kingdom of God into the future.

Not bad. Not bad at all for one little, short story!

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Illogical! Illogical!

Posted by on Sunday, July 12th, 2026 in Minister, News

https://youtu.be/0qfBbTo_yJo

Crieff, 12 July 2026 © Scott McAndless – Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 119:105-112, Titus 1:5-16, Matthew 5:43-4

Recently I read a book by Rachel Held Evans, a tremendous writer who was, unfortunately, taken from us far too young. As she was writing about some of the ways that we use the Bible, she made the point that she had never in her life heard anybody preach a sermon on Titus 1:12, where it says, “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.”

We claim to be people who take the Bible seriously. Some even claim to take it literally all the time and to believe everything it says. But, if that is the case, Evans argued, why is no one preaching sermons about how awful people from Crete are?

Why Don’t We Protest Cretans?

Why aren’t Christians marching with signs that declare that anyone who comes from Crete cannot be trusted and must not be believed? Why haven’t we attempted to cancel all celebrities who have any Cretan ancestry? Why aren’t Jennifer Anniston, Zach Galifianakis and Nana Mouskouri, who all claim parents who come from that large island in the Mediterranean, banned in all Christian churches?

I mean, the Bible says it. It couldn’t be clearer. After quoting this line, attributing it to a Cretan prophet, the writer goes on to add, “That testimony is true.” So why don’t we talk about that truth? And why, Evans wanted to know, doesn’t anyone preach about it?

Getting me to Preach About Something

I’m going to confess something to you. There is one way in which you can manipulate me as a preacher. If you suggest to me that no one has ever preached a sermon on a particular passage of Scripture, and especially if you suggest that preachers are afraid of talking about it, there is nothing that will make me want to preach that sermon more!

So, let’s tackle the question of just how lazy and unreliable people from Crete really are. What is such a saying doing in the Bible, and what should we do with it? It is especially difficult because it is such an absolute statement. It doesn’t say that sometimes some people from Crete can be a bit duplicitous. It doesn’t say, “I once knew a guy from Crete, and he told me a lie.” It is a blanket statement about all Cretans.

The Kind of Statement You Hear

I’ve never heard anyone say such things about people from Crete, of course, but it is the kind of statement that you do hear all the time in the world today. You will hear people say awful and ignorant things, things that I am not willing to repeat about, for example, all Palestinians, or all Jews, or all Muslims.

You will also hear generalized statements about what is wrong with all Republicans, or all Liberals, or all Socialists. Even the U.S. president himself just the other day said something about all Iranians being liars.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. If you hang out on the Internet in particular, you will read these kinds of absolute statements all the time. And they are not helpful statements. In fact, I would suggest that they are polarizing our discourse and destroying the fabric of our society more than just about anything these days.

What Was the Writer Saying?

So, I feel like I hear enough of this kind of rhetoric in our modern world. I am not happy to find it in my Bible. But of course, it is in our Bibles. And for me, that means that I need to deal with it and to try and understand what the writer was really trying to get across both to his immediate audience and to us reading it 2,000 years later.

But what if there is more going on in this verse than immediately meets the eye? It doesn’t exactly say that all Cretans are liars. It says that somebody said that all Cretans are liars. Well, who said it? The letter only refers to a prophet, but we actually know who that prophet was.

It was Epimenides of Knossos who said it. In fact, he was famous for saying it. He lived over six centuries before this letter was written, and yet he was still one of the most famous sons of Crete. He was known as a highly respected philosopher, poet and was indeed often called a prophet. This saying of his was so famous because it was known as Epimenides’ Paradox.

I Mudd

There is an old episode of Star Trek called “I Mudd,” in which the crew lands on a planet that is ruled by androids who are perfectly logical. It is an idyllic planet with one flaw: the androids won’t let anyone leave.

So the crew needs to come up with a plan to break android control – kind of like we may need to do once AI takes over our society. (Star Trek is nothing if not a reflection on today’s society.)

So, this is what the crew does. They begin to act in crazy and irrational ways which starts to overtax the data centres of the entire planet. The coup de grace is delivered when Captain Kirk says this about one of the characters to the Head Android, who is named Norman, “Everything Harry tells you is a lie,” Kirk says. “Remember that. Everything Harry tells you is a lie.”

And then Harry says this to the head android: “Now listen to this carefully, Norman. I am... lying.”

And I’m going to give you Norman’s response verbatim because it is so perfect. The android says: “You say you are lying, but if everything you say is a lie, then you are telling the truth, but you cannot tell the truth because everything you say is a lie, but you lie... You tell the truth but you cannot for you lie... illogical! Illogical!” And then the entire planetary system blows up because they cannot process such a statement.

Epimenides’ Paradox

Well, that is a perfect illustration of Epimenides’ Paradox. And Star Trek didn’t invent it; it was invented by Epimenides 600 years before the time of Christ.

When Epimenides said, “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons,” he said it as a Cretan and one who was highly respected. So how do you suppose he expected people to react? Do you think he was expecting everyone to nod and say, “That testimony is true, Cretans are all truly awful people”?

Of course not! He expected everyone to respond à la Norman and say, “You say Cretans always lie, but if you are a Cretan, then that statement is a lie, but if it is a lie then Cretans do not always lie and you may be telling the truth but if you are telling the truth then the statement is false. You tell the truth but you are a liar... illogical! Illogical!”

That is right. It turns out that Epimenides only said that to illustrate just how irrational it is to make blanket statements about groups of people.

Did the Writer Know?

And, like I say, this saying of Epimenides was famous in the ancient world. It was famous for that very reason. It was used to teach people not to make foolish blanket statements. So, my question is this. When this famous saying appears in the letter to Titus, how is it being used? Is the writer simply taking the statement at face value and affirming that all Cretans are awful people, or is he aware of the original famous intent of the statement? Is he actually affirming the irrationality of saying such things?

This letter is traditionally attributed to the Apostle Paul. And I would affirm that, if Paul wrote it, there is no way that he would have missed the important philosophical meaning of this saying. Paul, in all his letters, writes in such a way that demonstrates that he has been trained in Greek rhetorical and philosophical techniques. Paul would have known about Epimenides’ Paradox.

Modern New Testament scholars do argue, however, that this letter was not written by Paul. They say it can’t have been because it deals with matters and concerns that only arose after Paul’s death. Instead, they say it was written by someone who felt inspired by God to write for the church the wisdom Paul would have given concerning new challenges that had arisen after his death.

I’m not going to delve into the question of authorship today, but let me just say that whoever wrote this letter was no fool. When he tells his readers that this famous saying came from a Cretan philosopher, he must recognize there is a logical paradox at work in it.

He Doesn’t Believe It

But, even more importantly, even though this writer says that “that testimony is true,” He actually doesn’t believe that “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.” The whole point of this letter is that he wants Titus to help the Christians in Crete to be good, noble and righteous people. That would simply be impossible if they were always liars, vicious brutes and lazy gluttons.

So, I am left with the conclusion that this blanket statement appears in this letter for the same reason that Epimenides said it in the first place. He is writing to teach his readers just how foolish it is to adopt such attitudes towards any group. He is actually trying to show us that stereotyping, racism and exclusion are illogical.

Jesus’ Teaching on the Other

Such a notion should hardly be surprising to Christians, of course, who are followers of the one who challenged his disciples, saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Jesus did not invent the notion of loving your neighbour. It was a command that, even in his time, all Jews agreed was at the heart of the Old Testament Law. But it had always been understood in a very particular way.

People had always had a clear understanding of who their neighbour was. Their neighbour was their fellow Israelite. Their neighbour was someone who shared their culture, language and religion. So, for as long as this teaching had existed, no one would have seen any conflict between loving your neighbour and believing that “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.”

A Radical Idea

But Jesus shattered such an understanding. Here, and in other famous teachings like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, he showed people that the love they owed to their neighbour extended much further. It extended to the very people that they feel least comfortable loving.

This was a radical idea. But Jesus said you should behave in this way to reflect the true nature of God. He insists you should do it “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” He taught that by loving those who are most different from us, we become most like God.

Our Polarized World

We live in an increasingly polarized world. And one of the big symptoms of that is that we are surrounded by people who are constantly telling us that we cannot make peace or work with certain groups because they “are always liars,” or because they are all “vicious brutes,” or “lazy gluttons,” or because of some other shared trait that makes them completely evil.

This is not just some minor problem. It is something that is killing thousands of people daily, as it starts wars or prevents them from being ended, as we see at this very moment alongside the waters of the strait of Hormuz. It is threatening to tear whole countries apart, including our own.

An Antidote

Friends, we need an antidote to such rhetoric. And we have it. We have it in Epimenides, who demonstrated that such thinking is deeply illogical and self-defeating. Even more important, we have it in Jesus, who taught us to practice love for the very people we find hardest to love.

And how do we deploy that antidote? There is only one way. We need to start by living out this teaching of Jesus in the most radical way we possibly can. We need to welcome the stranger, to reach out to the hated Samaritan, to actually love a lazy, vicious brute of a lying Cretan enough to realize that they are actually none of those things.

I know it is a small thing to do it ourselves, but that is where true revolutions begin, in the small things. When we show the world that it can be done, new possibilities will arise everywhere. That is the challenge that Jesus has left for us.

A Challenge

So, I’m going to leave you with a challenge. This week, I want you to reach out to someone whom you have been taught is unacceptable because of whatever political, ethnic, religious or other group they belong to. I want you to try to get to know that person as a person, not just as a member of their group. That is where it starts; that is how we begin to bring a better world into view.

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