Julius: The second reading, will serve as the sermon text this morning from 1 Corinthians chapter 5. Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Purge out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, just as you are unleavened. For our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, namely Christ. So, let us keep celebrating the festival, not with old yeast nor with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Peace be with you from our risen Lord Jesus. Let's pray. Holy Spirit, open the eyes of our hearts to see wonderful things in your teaching. Amen. How should we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ? How should we celebrate Easter? Christmas we've got down. To celebrate the birth of Jesus, we take trees, which are supposed to be outside, and we bring them inside, and we take lights, which are supposed to be inside, and we bring them outside, and then we give each other presents. That's how we celebrate Jesus' birth. How about Easter? Eggs. And there can be some good Christian tradition and symbolism behind that egg, that life hidden inside. Easter bunny. I guess that's okay as long as you're not using it to worship some ancient fertility goddess. A lot of people celebrate Easter with a particular food. Are you like me? Do you need ham on Easter? Ham. It's not Easter without ham. And if you're thinking, yeah, I think the right way to celebrate Easter probably involves food, then you're right. At least Paul uses food as an image for how we should celebrate Easter properly in the reading that we're looking at today, 1 Corinthians chapter five. He says, if you want to celebrate Easter properly, you can't have any yeast. any leavened bread, not even a little bit, not even a little roll. He's using that as a picture for the Christian life. We read, do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Purge out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch just as you are unleavened, for our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, namely Christ. So, Let us keep celebrating the festival not with old yeast, not with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. And before we explore those verses a little further, we need to explore the background behind them. He says, Passover lamb has been sacrificed, so remember the details of the Passover, 1,500 years before Jesus was sacrificed to fulfill it. Moses and the Israelites were slaves in Egypt and the Lord was going to free them. He struck Pharaoh with ten plagues saying, let my people go. And the tenth plague was when the angel of death would come. and kill the firstborn in every household in Egypt, unless, unless they had followed the Lord's instructions and slaughtered a one-year-old male unblemished lamb and taken its blood and painted it on their doorpost. That night when the angel of death came, when he saw that blood on the doorpost, he passed over that house and death did not harm any of the Israelites. In the middle of the night, Pharaoh panicked. His firstborn was dead. Everybody in Egypt was crying out, we're all going to die. They said, you have to get the Israelites out of here. And so he said, go, get out of here, Moses, get out of here, Israelites. And they had to go as quickly as possible, including taking their bread, which hadn't had time to rise. for you bakers out there, you know it takes a little while for the yeast to work through the dough. Maybe you do first rise, maybe you do second rise after shaping the dough. No time for that. The call was so urgent, they had to leave so quickly that they just grabbed their dough before it had any yeast in it and they ran munching on unleavened crackers. And this then became part of the festival of the Passover. As they were celebrating this year after year to commemorate what God had done, God said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to spend seven days without any yeast in your house before the Passover lamb is sacrificed. I want you to search through the house and sweep it all out, search every little nook and cranny and get it out of there to remember what the Lord has done for you. And it wasn't just something you had to do in your house. It was something you had to do in the whole community. Exodus chapter 13 verse 7 says, yeast is to be seen among you anywhere in your entire territory. In your whole territory. It wasn't just enough to take the yeast out of your house. You had to go check your neighbors. Do you have any bread rising in here? Do you have any yeast? We gotta sweep it up. I mean, you know how hard this could be. Just the other day I was trying to clean the house for some people to come. And I swept the floor and it looked so clean. And then I opened the door and the sun shone in and the sun shining on the floor showed all of this dust that I had missed. What? I barely cleaned it at all. Think about this. The Lord says, you can't even have a speck, not even a little bit in the house. You got to clear it all out. Why? This seems as strange as the Easter bunny on Easter. What does this have to do with Passover? What does this have to do with Easter? Well, Exodus 13 goes on to explain, It's because of what the Lord did for me. That's really a succinct explanation of any celebration, right? I'm doing this because of this. I'm dancing because I won the card game. I'm eating a chocolate Easter bunny because Jesus invented chocolate and Easter bunnies. I'm doing this celebration because of this. And so on Passover, when they would eat these crackers and their kids would say, Mom, Why are we just eating crackers? Can't we eat normal bread? They could say this, ⁓ let me explain. We're doing this because of what the Lord did for me. We had to leave so fast, the bread didn't have time to rise. And now, when we think about what we left behind and how we brought none of that old yeast with us, we think about how the Lord let us leave that old life behind. We didn't even take a little bit with us. We were out of there, out of Egypt, free to start a new life. So we celebrate. That's what Paul is saying here. Why or how do you celebrate Easter? He says by purging out the old yeast from our lives, setting aside that old life, enjoying the new life. Don't even have a little bit left of what you used to be. And why does the apostle Paul have to tell us that this is the way to celebrate Easter? Well, because some people in Corinth were celebrating it all wrong. In Corinth, there was a man who said, ⁓ great, Easter, Jesus died to take away my sins, so that means I can do whatever I want, right? And it wasn't enough just for him. He came into the congregation like that. He said, guys, I know how to celebrate Easter. Jesus forgave my sins against the sixth commandment, adultery, and so I can now break the sixth commandment as much as I want. This man was doing something that even non-Christians in Corinth thought was wrong. He had taken his father's wife. He said, this is how to celebrate Easter. Jesus forgave my sins so I can take whoever I want as my spouse and parade it in the congregation. Guys, isn't Easter cool? Let's party! And some of the congregation was going along with it. And this is why Paul had to say this. Guys, that's not how you celebrate Easter. That doesn't even make any sense, does it? Paul says, do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Purge out the old yeast. so that you may be a new batch. A new batch. In other words, Paul is saying, that's the kind of stuff you used to do. That's your old life, but now that Jesus has done this for you, why would you go back to that? When Jesus has forgiven that and brought you into a new life, that doesn't make sense. That'd be like if you rose again from the dead and said, ⁓ this is cool. I'm going to go take a nap in my coffin. No! That's like the Israelites when they came out of Egypt saying, hey, it was better back in Egypt. Let's go back to slavery. No! That doesn't make any sense. Or it'd be like me when I was at seminary going back to my old room. And when I was at seminary, we had some classmates who got a really good deal on a couch at Goodwill. And they brought it into the dorms. No problem, right? It's just affecting their room. No, it had bedbugs. There were bedbugs in this couch, but soon they weren't just in that couch. They went everywhere. You know, they go searching. I know a lot about bedbugs now. They go find the people they like. They liked me a lot. And so I was waking up in the morning with this streak of red dots, itchy red dots on my chest. What is going on? And I looked in the little cracks beneath the mattress and there they were, tiny little bed bugs. And you know I killed as many as possible, but they were still there. I started panicking, especially when no one believed me. I felt crazy. They're here, they're here, they're everywhere. Thankfully, I had a really nice fiance visiting me at the time. And there's two things that kill bedbugs. Extreme cold and extreme heat. So while I was at school one day, my wonderful fiance rented a steamer and went into that room and blasted it all. Blasted every nook and cranny, blasted every piece of clothing, put everything else in the wash and vacated the room. And then we closed the door put a towel underneath and open the window to allow the frigid Wisconsin winter to blaze it for the three weeks of winter break. And when we came back, we thought they're dead. But you know what, I didn't check. Because I did not move back into that room. And I wasn't allowed, but I went to the other end of the seminary, the other end of the dorms where no one was supposed to be sleeping, and I found myself a nice new room all by myself, away from everyone else, far away from that room to sleep. I wasn't going back. I didn't want to. Not even a little bit. Paul says that that's what Easter is like. What has Jesus done for us? We talks about it later in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, Death is swallowed up in victory. Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus died on the cross as that true Passover lamb, not to free us from Pharaoh, but to free us from Satan, not to free us from physical slavery, but from spiritual slavery, not to save us from one angel of death, but from death and eternal death. He saved us from all of that and gave us a new life. And here he says, don't move back. Don't go back into that room. Even if there's just one little bed bug there, it's not worth it. Or as Paul puts it, purge out the old yeast. so that you may be a new batch." And the yeast he's talking about is that yeast of malice and wickedness that that man in Corinth was celebrating. He said, saved me so I can use that as a cover-up, so I can live a wicked life. And Paul says, ⁓ don't you know that even just a little bit of that staying in your life spreads? It's infectious, it's dangerous for you and everyone else. And he says that to us. He says, if it was important for the Israelites, to get every last crumb of leavened bread out of their house, how much more important is it for us to search our souls according to the word of God and get rid of every last crumb of sin? But notice the good news in these verses, embedded in these verses and in Paul's command. He doesn't say, if you want to celebrate Easter properly, you better shape up first. You better be like those Israelites. Seven days of getting rid of everything evil in your life and then maybe you can join the party. That's not what he says. No, Paul says, ⁓ just as you are unleavened. For our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, just as you are. In other words, he's saying that Jesus' sacrifice on the cross has already purged all of that away. When the bright light of God's righteousness shone on Jesus and all the sin of the world, Jesus swept away every last crumb and he scoured it from your heart. to make you a new batch, a new unleavened loaf. And Paul doesn't say, so now, now you can start partying. No, what did he say? Let us keep celebrating. Let us keep celebrating. In other words, you're already at the party. Jesus has already brought you into the party. Through your baptism you are connected to Him. You died with Him and left your sins there. And you rose with Him when He left the grave and you are not going back to move in. So how do you celebrate? I don't know, a day of Easter eggs isn't enough. Even eating ham today, there's gotta be more, more to celebrating Easter. How do you celebrate? Paul says. Be who the Lord says that you are. Be in practice what the Lord has made you in principle. That's how you celebrate the one who stared death in the face and death blinked and ran away from Jesus and ran out of your life. So when there's that temptation inside of you that says, can I go back? Wasn't it nice? Should I go back to that old life? You say, no, no, no, I will give you to the count of three days to get back in that grave. You don't belong with me anymore. And when the devil tries to tempt you, can't you use this as a cover up? You say, devil, you know what happened last time you tried to face Jesus? He crushed your head and rose from the dead. How do you celebrate Easter? You live the new life that Jesus has given you. And that's not a celebration that ends at death. Now this party goes on forever. When we close our eyes in death and we open them to see that we have not perished but have eternal life, we will see that the party goes on and it's even better in heaven. Because in heaven, there's not even a little bit of temptation and sin and death and crying and pain and sorrow. It is all gone. And when we are there, partying in heaven forever in our new, glorious life, even if the Lord would say, Do you want to go back? He won't. But even if the Lord said, do you want to go back, you know what you're going to answer? Not even a little bit. Amen.