6 Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 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. 8 Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth. 9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11 But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such a person.

Paul is in the middle of something serious. A man in the Corinthian church was sleeping with his father's wife, and everyone knew. What Paul finds hardest to believe is not the sin itself. It is the mood of the room around it.

They were proud.

"Your boasting is not good."

That is a mild sentence for a heavy moment. Paul is not shocked that a man fell. He has watched people fall. He is shocked at a church that had learned to feel good about itself while this went on in plain sight. Somewhere along the way they had started reading their own tolerance as maturity. Look how free we are. Look how far past judging we have come.

So he does not begin with the man. He begins with the congregation's satisfaction with itself, because that was the part they could not see.

Then he gives them the picture.

"Don't you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?"

Anyone who has made bread knows this is not a comment about size. A pinch of yeast vanishes into the flour. A minute later you could not find it. And it still changes everything it touches, quietly, from the inside, until the whole batch has risen.

Paul is describing how a thing behaves, not how much of it there is. Something small does not stay small when it is left in a warm place among people.

That is why he will not treat one situation as one situation. It never stays one. What a community agrees to live with is what that community slowly becomes. Not by a vote, not by a decision anyone remembers making. By a spread nobody notices until the shape has changed.

And notice where the yeast is working. Not out in the city. In the batch. Paul's concern here is the church's insides.

The next line is where the passage turns, and the order of it matters more than anything else in these verses.

"Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are."

Read that last phrase again. As you really are.

He does not say: clean yourselves up so God will accept you. He says: you already are what I am asking you to become. So be it.

That is the logic of the whole Christian life in four words. The command comes second. The gift comes first. Paul never tells anyone to work their way toward a status. He tells them what they have already been made, and then asks them to live inside it.

And he says why it is true, immediately.

"For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."

The reason they can be called unleavened is not their record. It is a lamb. What happened at the cross is what makes "as you really are" an honest sentence instead of flattery.

So the sweeping out is not how you get in. It is what people who are already in do about the leftovers.

Paul has Passover in mind the whole way through, and the picture gets sharper.

Before Passover, a Jewish household cleared every trace of yeast out of the house. They went through the shelves and the corners and the cupboards. Then came a week of eating bread with nothing in it. The lamb was killed, and the house was swept.

"Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth."

Two short lists, set against each other.

Malice and wickedness. Malice is the settled wish that someone else does badly. It is quieter than hatred, and it keeps much longer.

Sincerity and truth. Sincerity here carries the sense of being one thing all the way through — nothing hidden in the middle, nothing performing. Truth is being the same on the outside as you are inside.

See what has happened. Paul opened with a scandal every person in Corinth could name. He closes with sins nobody would have raised at the meeting. The old yeast he wants gone is not only the obvious thing on the front page. It is the grudge you keep warm. The second version of yourself you have made peace with.

That is the kind of yeast that survives a clear-out of the obvious things.

Then Paul stops to correct a misreading, and it is a good thing he did.

"I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world."

They had taken an earlier instruction and pointed it outward. Paul says that was never it. He is almost dry about it — if I had meant the world, you would have to leave the planet.

Jesus ate with the people the religious would not eat with. Paul is not undoing that. He is not building a wall between the church and the city.

"But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler."

The line falls inside, not outside. It concerns a person who carries the name, and insists on living against it, openly, with no intention of turning.

And look at the list he writes. Sexually immoral, greedy, an idolater, a slanderer, a drunkard, a swindler. Greed sits right next to immorality. The person who quietly talks others down is in the same sentence. Corinth would have been ready to remove one kind of person. Paul writes a list that clears out most of our comfortable seats too.

This is a hard passage and I do not want to make it soft. But it is worth seeing what it is for. A few verses earlier Paul says the point of the whole painful business is that the man would be saved in the end. It is not punishment. It is a refusal to let someone stay comfortable in something that is quietly killing them — the last thing love has left after words have stopped working. And it belongs to a church acting together, slowly and carefully, not to us picking off people we have privately decided about.

Most of us are not handling a case like Corinth's this week. But the yeast is still doing what yeast does.

So one question to carry. What small thing have you agreed to live with?

Not the thing you are fighting. The thing you stopped fighting and started managing. The resentment you keep warm because it feels justified. The habit you have built your week around instead of ending. The test is not how big it is. The test is that you no longer expect it to leave.

And a second one. Where are you two things at once? Somewhere you are one person on the outside and another underneath, and you have got good enough at it that nobody asks. Sincerity is the opposite of that. One thing, all the way through.

Neither question is asking you to earn anything. That is the part worth holding on to. The lamb has already been sacrificed. You are already the new batch. Today is just about clearing out what is still sitting in the cupboard from before.

All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍

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