Yeast

"This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD -a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel." - Exodus 12: 14-15

"Be careful," Jesus said to them. "Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees." – Matthew 16:6

Today’s reading from the Old Testament is the first Passover. It is the preparation for the last and final event where the first born of each house hold, human and animal, will be killed. God gives the people specific instructions so that they will be passed over, and not affected by this plague.

Coincidentally the New Testament portion of the reading has Jesus coming down hard on the Pharisees and Sadducees (the religious elite of Israel during the time of Jesus). He warns his disciples of the “yeast” of The Pharisees and Sadducees.

Huh?

Then I thought more about it and was like hmmm… ok yeast must be bad… but what is the message here.

Then after doing some digging around on the internet (and among the cobwebs of my mind) I remembered a very important thing about yeast. It changes the nature of bread when it is added. A very small amount of yeast goes a long way.

What I get from this is that it is really important that we keep good council.

Most of us are flooded with information. I for one have more information that I can handle. In November I got the fancy Droid phone and now have my facebook, twitter, email, news, text, apps all in my pocket.

The nerd in me is dancing a jig.

But I came to realize that not all of this information is good information.

The most problematic source in my pocket is Twitter. There are all kinds of people giving their two cents about life in 140 characters or less. Rick Warren, Rev Run, and Paulo Coelho are all people that I follow. They say insightful things that challenge me, make me laugh and overall stimulate my growth.

And then there are other folk on there…

There are folk who always have something negative to say, or insist on being argumentative, or just like to tear others down.

The more that I started to use twitter the more I realized I had to cut some of these folk out.

Not everyone that has something to say is saying something good.

An even smaller amount of these folk consistently say great things that will be beneficial for your life.

When we let these naysayers, discouragers, detractors, and haters into our lives they end up chipping away at our faith.

The Pharisees were trying to bait Jesus into showing “a sign from heaven” but he would not do it. Their baiting seems to say “You can’t do it; you must not be who you say you are”.

I’m sure that his disciples wanted Jesus to do it; and when he didn’t, they may have felt a twinge of doubt.

“Can He do a miracle on command? Maybe those pitchers already had wine in them?”

Doubt is like yeast to our faith. Once it takes hold it will multiply and bubble up and flourish to the point where our once strong faith has been mutated into fear.

It is important then to make sure that the people we are close to, the sources of information we most cherish, and the environments that we put ourselves in nourish the faith that we need to live our lives to the fullest.

Misery loves company. Nothing good comes of kickin’ it with that clown.

Today’s Reading: Exodus 12-13; Matthew 16