Last Sunday before the liturgy a parishioner told me that the “Weekly Woe” (my name for the four-year(!) series appearing on our webpage) I wrote for Pentecost [Missionary to the Miscreants] left him a bit puzzled.  Some of it was apparently a might difficult to fathom.  Looking back through it, I whole-heartedly agree, simply because it calls to mind that Jesus’ comments increasingly puzzled his own disciples as his ascension drew near.  They couldn’t fathom what he was telling them, and I’m not sure – even after some two thousand years of Church teaching, mission, and outreach – we understand it any better or more easily.  Moreover, to rub salt into their wounded hearts, Jesus told the disciples [and us!] that he absolutely must leave them, otherwise the promised Holy Spirit will not come to guide you into all truth. The disciples were profoundly saddened by that news, not to mention Jesus’ intimation that there were many other things they simply were not yet able to bear [John 16:12].  Becoming Jesus’ disciples, equipped and ready to go into all the world…, was not going to be an easy process.  No wonder the original band of followers were puzzled.  We should expect no less ourselves while we still are enlisted recruits in Jesus’ bootcamp.

            The reality of being greenhorn recruits for Jesus is that we arrive bearing obvious marks of the world around us.  We are motivated far more readily by self-interest and preservation than altruistic impulses. We hope that we’re in a position to negotiate a cushy nine-to-five discipleship schedule with at least an hour for lunch and a six-week vacation during our time in bootcamp.  Much to our surprise and disgust, dear sweet Jesus begins to resemble a demanding drill sergeant, laying down the law of love with its requirements of forgiving even seventy-seven times seven, being generous to a fault, entering into a life of prayerful openness, and telling us that even the most unlikely (and to us unsavory) folks are our sisters and brothers.  This is probably not our expectation nor the routine of convenience and summertime easy livin’ we’d prefer to embrace.

            However, like all analogies the comparison eventually does break down.  U.S. Army bootcamps like Fort Jackson’s have determined drill sergeants on staff charged with turning flabby and befuddled young men and women into upright, trustworthy, and decent soldiers, a credit to the Red, White, and Blue.  Drill sergeants are a constant thorn in the recruits’ flesh for six weeks or so, usually glad to be done with the rookies and happy to send them on their way.  This is the point where drill sergeants differ from Jesus, not to mention (as I did in the previous writing) Nurse Mathilda and Nanny McPhee.  The children’s books and Emma Thompson’s movie sought to reveal how such formative figures may well stay with their unruly charges throughout life, if not in person at least in spirit, the once-forbidding individuals continuing to keep the best interests of their former charges close to their hearts.  Jesus does most certainly!

            Part of Jesus’ mission in this fascinating but pitiful world of ours was to enter into life around him as a living, breathing person utterly dedicated to the Almighty’s saving mission to a flabby, feckless, and dying world.  During a one to three year period [depending upon which Gospel you’re reading] the adult Jesus calls close disciples who stay with him 24/7, learning about the Father’s intentions for Creation, and motivated by a love which will ultimately conquer every sin, suspicion, treachery, and mortal terror, even death itself, the last enemy to be destroyed… [I Corinthians 15:26].  Do they understand exactly how that will be achieved by God? NO!  Given such a significant reason for Jesus’ forgiving, saving presence in the world, do they understand why Jesus tells them he will have to return to the Father? NO!  Do we comprehend the full mystery of redemption any better than they? NO!  Do we understand fully why the Holy Spirit is sent as Advocate and Comforter on Pentecost and what the Spirit will accomplish?  Probably not, but by opening our eyes and ears of faith the Spirit over time enables us to speak words of faith to God in prayer and to folks we meet, a message that is shaped by God’s loving welcome to one and all who draw near.

            So, what in heaven’s name does Sourdough Jesus and the Spirit intend to communicate? Behind the gastronomic reference is a desire to understand Jesus’ departure in order that the Spirit might be an enlivening force in our lives each and every day.  The incarnate Jesus was and remains a person who lived for some thirty-three years near the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. He led a peripatetic life, his missionary trips of healing and preaching repentance and the forgiveness of sins taking him miles up and down the coast with a band of disciples trailing along and great crowds gathering wherever he went.  The incarnate Jesus often found himself bone-weary, sometimes going off to a quiet, deserted place in order to escape the press of people and regain his focus.  With neither planes nor trains, automobiles nor even a bicycle, and only one reference to his borrowing a donkey, Jesus traversed on foot whatever terrain he could to meet whomever gathered, feeding them, teaching them, forgiving them, and healing them, bringing compelling words of hope to those who lived in constant despair. Even had he lived on earth to a ripe old age, the physical and emotional limits of his own person would have kept him in the immediate region [St. Paul did do some further traveling by boat in later years as did the remaining disciples, legend tells us].  Moreover, the incarnate Jesus was limited to a specific time in history, meaning that we in the Carolina midlands in the twenty-first century would have no chance to see, hear, or meet the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth.  So there really was method in his sadness at going; he wasn’t crazy as some around him feared.  It is the Spirit of Truth, unbounded by the incarnate life, time, or geography who palpably keeps Jesus’ presence with us.  Jesus’ relationship to the Spirit is similar, in fact, to the yeast which forms the starter for a loaf of sourdough bread.

            Gastro-Egyptologists [it really is a word: scientists who study the diets of ancient Egyptians] and sourdough bread-nerds like Seamus Blackley (who incidentally invented the original XBox in his spare time) have spent a good deal of energy researching the makeup of sourdough.  Blackley and a few Gastro-Egyptologists were able to extract dormant sourdough yeast from the residue on clay pots found in tombs [similar to those in Sunday’s second reading], coaxing the yeast into a viable sourdough starter, and eventually bread [rather sweeter than expected, following ancient recipes].  Somehow, life is preserved and transmitted in the microscopic, single-celled yeast like the jar of yeast you have squirreled away somewhere.  The leaven of Blackley’s loaf of Egyptian sourdough dated back some 4,500 years!  Another strain of sourdough still produces the so-called “Black Death Loaf,” a dark, fragrant rye loaf relying on yeast with a 600 year German pedigree.  The famous San Francisco sourdough loaves depend upon a starter that claims about a 160 year-old ancestral line.  The original loaves have long ago been consumed or disintegrated; otherwise, they’d be ossified blocks.  It is the living yeast nurtured daily which extends the ancestral line. One woman, interviewed in one of the countless webpage articles about sourdough, reports that she is still using sourdough first started from wild yeast while her great-grandfather Wesley David Ballentine [anyone’s relative?] was in the Klondike mining for gold, navigating the brutal Chilkoot Pass in the 1890s to reach the gold in them thar’ hills!

            Jesus’ incarnate self on earth was limited. He ascended as the resurrected Lord in glory, a much different estate than we mortals still living and dying while awaiting his return in glory.  Having repeatedly shared these things to come with his still-doubting disciples, Jesus provides the divine rational for sending the Spirit who continues to blow when and where it wills.  The Spirit’s “proper” work is testifying to the ways and means of God revealed on earth by the incarnate Christ Jesus.  The Spirit’s “proper” work is to grant gifts through the Church’s mission and ministry (though the Spirit is never bound by the limits of the Church’s ministries) to God’s latter-day faithful disciples, including you and me.  Moreover, like the historic bakeries and individual bakers around the world who daily feed and nurture sourdough starters hundreds of years old, the Spirit’s work and mission is never dormant.  This echoes the many references of leavening and yeast throughout scripture. Like the eternal Word [John 1], the Spirit’s lineage stretches back to the second verse of Genesis’ first chapter. A familiar parable of Jesus is to the point: And again [Jesus] said, “To what should I compare the kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened [Luke 13:20-21].”  The yeast already was there, ready to blossom.

            Jesus berates his disciples for their hardened hearts after once feeding the crowds with only five loaves: When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” They said to him, “Twelve.” “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” And they said to him, “Seven.” Then he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?” [Mark 8:17-21]. Is there a message for us, too, in his searching questions?  Although those original five loaves yielded a plenteous meal for the crowds with leftovers, that same pattern continues beyond Jesus’ own time on earth, as the bread of life is shared with us, and by us to the hungry and yearning of this world, thanks to the powerful sourdough starter of Jesus’ own life and presence the Spirit enlivens until his return.