Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? – 1 Corinthians 5:16

Today's Scripture Reading (February 13, 2021): 1 Corinthians 5

Sourdough bread. Once you have made it, the secret of the dough is found in the remaking. A little lump of yesterday’s dough becomes the leaven needed for tomorrow’s batch. A lump taken from yesterday's bread is necessary to create tomorrow’s loaf; it is all that is required in order to leaven the dough, and the result is delicious.

But there is also a problem with this kind of bread making. The bread could become tainted and unhealthy. This is the health benefit behind the purge of leaven from the house every Passover. “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 12:15). At least once a year, the yeast, including those valuable lumps of dough used to leaven the next loaf, had to be discarded. The result was that the baker was forced to make the bread from scratch, preventing anything that had tainted the bread from spreading any further.

Bread making became a model for Paul of the way sin works in a congregation. It doesn’t take much sin present in the community to work through the whole. The corruption might start small, but unconfronted, it grows until it takes over the community as a whole.

Paul was confronting a sin that was present in the Corinthian Church. It is important to note that the evil present in the Church at Corinth was not something that was open to debate. A man was sexually involved with his father’s wife, and although the text seems to make it clear that this was not his mother, it remained a sin “of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate” (1 Corinthians 5:1). You don’t have to be a believer in Jesus or God to know that this behavior is wrong and that is significant. There was no one in the culture that was willing to defend what the man was doing. The action was unanimously condemned, and yet, the Corinthian church was not condemning the behavior. And as a result, their image in the community was unnecessarily tarnished.

Paul was bothered by the sin of the man, but he was more disturbed by the church's inaction. The sin of the leaders was much more important in the thoughts of Paul. They had allowed the church to become tainted and had poisoned the church.

And now was the time to purge the yeast in the church and start over fresh once again.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 6