Youth Group

Baking with the Bible

Parable of the Leaven
“God’s kingdom is like yeast that a woman works into the dough for dozens of loaves of barley bread—and waits while the dough rises.”
All Jesus did that day was tell stories—a long storytelling afternoon. His storytelling fulfilled the prophecy:
I will open my mouth and tell stories;
I will bring out into the open
    things hidden since the world’s first day.

In our story today, a woman mixes just a tiny bit of yeast into a large amount of flour—about 35 pounds of flour in total. When yeast works its way through dough, it is called leavening the dough, or raising the dough. Sometimes yeast is called leaven. It takes a long time for the leaven to work its way through that much flour, but when it does it grows from the byproduct of gasses that the leaven produces. Like all things that grow, you have to be patient for the growth and transformation to take place. You cannot rush growth.

Yeasts are actually microbes. They eat their way through the toughest parts of flour, the parts that humans cannot digest well. The more slowly the bread rises, the more flavor it develops. Sourdough, which uses a starter created from wild yeast, takes a longer time to rise than bread made from a commercial yeast. This gives it lots more flavor than the average grocery store loaf. The woman in the story would have used this kind of leaven.

In what way is the kingdom of God like leaven? How can we help God's love to spread like the leaven? One of the ways we can spread love is by baking bread to share with others.