Happy Yeaster

First off, I need to tell you that my dad came up with the title of this post. Classic dad joke. (Erik can’t wait until he has official clearance to start making dad jokes.) 

But what does yeast have to do with Easter? It turns out, everything. (And not just because, like Jesus, it rises. Wah wah.) For Jews, yeast is a symbol of arrogance and sinful attitudes that need to be purged, but for me, it has also become a symbol of reliance on Jesus for salvation. Don’t worry; I’ll explain. 

Tonight at sundown is the beginning of Passover, which means today is the day that Jews need to finish cleaning out all the chametz (leaven) from their homes. In its modern form, that practice means doing a deep clean of the whole house to get rid of any possible leaven. Here’s an explanation: 

“Chametz … is any food product made from wheat, barley, rye, oats or spelt that has come into contact with water and been allowed to ferment and ‘rise.’ In practice, just about anything made from these grains—other than Passover matzah, which is carefully controlled to avoid leavening—is to be considered chametz. This includes flour (even before it is mixed with water), cake, cookies, pasta, breads, and items that have chametz as an ingredient, like malt.”

Chabad.org

Modern Jews sanitize their sinks, counters, dishes, and even line the inside surfaces of their ovens and refrigerators to prevent any possible contact with chametz. That sounds pretty extreme to my Christian ears. And also pretty impossible. Because I’ve just learned that yeast is everywhere! 

Like a horde of other bored housewives during this quarantine, I’ve started making sourdough bread. The way it works is super basic, but I didn’t know this until like a week ago, so I’m going to spell it out here: 

Normal bread rises because we add a little yellow packet of commercial yeast to it. Sourdough bread rises because we add a sourdough starter to it, which is basically a homegrown fungus farm of wild yeast. 

Literally all you have to do to make a sourdough starter is mix some flour and water together and let it sit there. Then microscopic yeast all around us (in the air, in your flour bag, on the jar you used, whatever) will start to grow in the flour and ferment it. (Well, ok, there’s one more step: it makes smelly liquid as a by-product, so you pour that off every day or so and add a little more fresh flour/water for the yeast to eat. That’s called “feeding” it. You do it for about a week, and the starter is ready to leaven your bread.) That’s it! It’s just a process of cultivating wild yeast. 

It blew my mind to learn this week that commercial yeasts like Fleischmann’s weren’t available until World War II. Up until that point, everyone just made sourdough. That means the leaven that the Israelites had in Egypt was more like the jar of flour/water paste on my counter than like the little packets of dry granules we’re used to. 

Now it makes even more sense to me why God told them to make unleavened bread as they were preparing to high-tail it out of Egypt overnight. Bread from regular commercial yeast takes maybe an hour or two to rise, but sourdough takes a lot longer. The last recipe I used said “3 to 12 hours.” (It depends on the starter and also on lots of environmental factors we can’t control. Lots of people leave their sourdough bread to rise overnight.) So there wouldn’t have even been time for the Israelites to make that kind of bread in between Moses’s announcement of the last plague and its fulfilment. Their only option would have been something more like tortillas (which take me about an hour for a batch, start to finish–  that’s been another quarantine project!).

So why am I so excited about yeast? 

First, it’s a good illustration of sin: it’s all around us and hard to see. It can grow with just the slightest encouragement. You let your flour get moist and there it goes, bubbling up into yeast colonies again. There’s no way to ever purge it all out on our own. You can scrub and sanitize all you want, but I bet if I walk into a house where somebody has cleaned out all their chametz, I could still get a sourdough starter to start with enough coaxing. 

The only way we will ever be pure enough to stand before God, with all our chametz taken out, is to be washed by Jesus. Fascinatingly, modern Jews have a loophole so they don’t have to completely rid their houses of chametz. They can take all their flour, contaminated dishes and other things they don’t want to toss, and seal them into a cabinet or shed. Then they make a legal agreement to “sell” that space to a non-Jew for the duration of Passover so they don’t “own” it during that time. (Check it out here.  They can also pray a specific prayer to nullify their possession of any chametz they might have missed, just in case.

We can’t get rid of all our chametz on our own, no matter how much sanitizing we do. We need Jesus to buy all of it from us. (Permanently.) 

The second thing I love about yeast: it’s a good illustration of dependence on God for provision. God told the Israelites to throw out their yeast (read: sourdough starters!) when they fled Egypt. Every year after that, they were supposed to throw out their starters again and stop eating yeast for a week to commemorate what happened when God set them free. 

“Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. 18 In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. 19 For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And anyone, whether foreigner or native-born, who eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel. 20 Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.”

Exodus 12:17-20

When you throw out a sourdough starter, it takes about a week to get it going again. For a community without commercial yeast, that means you’re going to be eating tortillas for at least a week until you can re-cultivate enough wild yeast to leaven your dough. It also means you’re getting rid of something you’ve carefully tended and kept alive for a long time. You’re agreeing to start over with a fresh jar of flour and water on the counter, trusting that the wild yeast will be there to get it bubbling up again. You can’t see the yeast around you and you can’t put it in on your own; you have to trust God to provide that part naturally like he did in the past so you can have bread again. 

I love the image of throwing out the starter and being forced to trust God that there will still be wild yeast in the air and he’ll allow it to grow again for you in the future. To me, that’s a picture of salvation and God’s provision. Spiritually, we give up on all the things we’ve been trying to build and recognize that it will never be enough. We need God to provide the bread from heaven so we can have eternal life. Physically, at some point, we have to be able to let go of our own strength (or salary, or savings) and trust God to keep providing our daily bread. And he will!

Happy Yeaster! 

P.S.: a little extra info for those who might be interested:

Here are good instructions for making your own sourdough starter. 

Here are the recipes I’ve been using for sourdough bread, sourdough bagels, and soft pretzels.  And this is the recipe I like for tortillas! 

I lifted the photo at the top from kingarthurflour.com. 

P.P.S. How is your social distancing going? Any baking? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!