My husband in an act of generosity (?) bought me a bread maker for Christmas a few years back. I think this was perhaps because I had attempted to make bread the “old-fashioned” way, and the resulting loaves were more useful as building bricks than as nourishment!
The bread that came from the bread maker was warm, fully risen and delicious with butter and honey from our own hives.
However there was a period of time, when I realised that eating all this fresh bread was having an unfortunate side effect on my waistline, so the bread maker gathered dust for seral months, perhaps even over a year.
A few months ago I relented and dusted it off, and once more eagerly anticipated waking up to the aroma of a freshly baked loaf of bread.
However, on lifting the lid, I was greeted once more with a heavy brick of something inedible. (Even the birds turned their beaks up at it!)
What I had failed to do, of course, was make sure the yeast I was using was fresh. (The tin yeast had probably been opened when I last baked bread many months before.)
The bible reading set for Easter evening is from 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8 “Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch – as you really are. For Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
At Easter time we celebrate our Risen Lord, who sacrificed himself so that we can discard the old lifeless and useless yeast, once and for all.
Prayer: Risen Lord, thank you for the sacrifice you made so that we might be free from sin. May we cast aside the old yeast, and celebrate you as our Risen and Living Lord. AMEN