Once upon a time, not so very long ago, I looked at my kitchen on a Monday morning. It wasn’t a wreck, but it was far from clean. You know how it is, you know you should clean it, but you can’t quite find the energy for it: and besides it would take two or three hours to get the job done and maybe tomorrow or the next day would be better.

So I recalled what I had often done, when my children were young and impressionable. I raised my hands and intoned: “Kitchen: be clean!” And I waved my arms in a magical way, and made the magical sound effect: “Bih – bshshshshsh!” As always, it did not work. But my children had always liked watching me do it. Something like that, anyway: maybe they were just laughing at me.

“It’s not like the kitchen is a disaster,” I said to myself. “There are plates stacked crookedly on top of each other, the counters are scattered with crumbs, there’s a smear of … something … on the stove top. But you could still cook here. Probably cook tomorrow, too. What about Wednesday? Probably need to rearrange the piles of dirty dishes by then, to have enough room.”

It might have been guilt. It might have been pragmatism. It might have been boredom, but I don’t think so: I’ve been seriously bored from time to time, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so bored that housework seemed intriguing. Whatever got me going, though, it moved me to say to myself, “All right, I’ll just clean a little bit. There’s no way I’m going to clean this whole thing today, but if I do one section today, and then another section tomorrow, by the end of the week it’ll be looking pretty good, and I won’t have used up all my energy in getting it done in one day.”

So I emptied the dishwasher and loaded it full – but not too full. If you maneuver as many dishes in, as compactly as you can, they’ll shield each other from the jets and they won’t get clean. I added the detergent and pressed the button.

After I did that, all that remained to the left of the sink was the wineglasses. I don’t like to run them in the dishwasher anyway, because if they end up with the least little water spot it really shows up on the glass. After you do wineglasses in the dishwasher, you have to re-rinse them and then polish them by hand afterwards. Might as well save the space in the dishwasher for something else, and just wash and wipe and polish the glasses at the start. So I washed the four wineglasses, polished them, and put them in the cabinet.

But now that the counter to the left of the sink was clear of dishes, it seemed lame not to wipe it down. It’s not like it was covered with crumbs and food particles, but there were some, and there’s just something about a counter that is almost clean that makes you rinse out the dishcloth in hot water and wipe it down: then rinse the cloth again and spray the counter with cleanser, and wipe it all again. And then take a clean kitchen towel and dry it. Yeah. That counter looks great.

Next to the counter is the stove top, with a couple of large pans and that smear of … something. Was that gravy? Worcestershire sauce? Maybe ketchup? I moved the pans to the sink, ran hot water and dish detergent into both of them, rinsed my dishcloth again, and got to work on the stove top. That dark reddish brown smear was on there pretty good, but there’s nothing like hot water to soften up a smear of … something. By now I really was curious as to what it was, but not curious enough to try tasting it. I’d either remember what it was I had cooked and spilled there, or else I would go to my grave not knowing.

It took three cycles of wiping the stove top with the hot wet dishcloth, but in the end the stove was shining. That felt pretty good. But the three cycles of rinsing out the dishcloth had been hampered a bit by the pans that were in my way. The pans would be easier to clean now, when they were filled with hot soapy water, I thought. But no. I’m not going to wash them right now. I’ll do it later, or tomorrow. They’re fine, here in the sink for right now.

That’s enough, I said. I admired my handiwork on the counter and the stove. It would have been fine, if I had just closed my eyes and walked out the kitchen door. But my eye fell on the kitchen table. It had probably been the cleanest surface in the room when I started, but in comparison to the counter and the stove, it now looked terrible. I had bussed the dishes earlier; now I picked up the used cloth napkins and put them in the hamper. That was easy enough to do; why hadn’t I done it for each napkin after the meal? I had used up the last of the milk on my cereal that morning, but the empty milk carton was still standing guard on the table. That was embarrassing. Why keep an empty milk carton? How hard could it have been to walk six steps from the table to the trash and take care of it after breakfast? Ah well. At least the kitchen table was cleared now.

The kitchen was not clean, I thought, but it was a good deal cleaner than it was, so I could now walk away and do the next round of cleaning tomorrow. As soon as I wiped the kitchen table. There were some scattered crumbs there and a few escaped corn flakes, and twenty-five minutes ago they had seemed negligible. Now they were crying out to shame me, mocking me as they sat there. I ran hot water on the dish cloth, wiped away the debris, rinsed the cloth again and wiped the table hard, making it shine. Ha! You won’t shame me, you little corn flakes!

All that was left was to rinse out the dish cloth and hang it over the spigot. But here were those two pans, filled with hot soapy water, just needing to be scrubbed and dried and put away. I am not going to do this right now, I said to myself.

Jesus once told a story about a woman making bread. He compared her work to the kingdom of heaven. She mixes the leaven into the lump of dough. The leaven we use today is mostly yeast, which comes in little packets at the grocery store. The leaven they used in Bible times was what we now call sourdough. You make a slurry from a little flour and water mixed together in a bowl, and you set the bowl on the counter, and wild yeast spores floating invisibly in the air land on your flour-and-water slurry and begin to grow. In a week or so your leaven has gotten bubbly, a little bit more every day, and now it’s ready. You mix it into a big lump of bread dough, and it will leaven that dough, making it rise. The kingdom of heaven is like that, Jesus said. That little bowl of sourdough leaven transforms the big batch of dough from heavy and inert to light and lively. And that’s our one verse passage for today: “Jesus told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened’ ” (Matthew 13:33, NRSV).

The Apostle Paul used that imagery the other way around in a couple of his letters. The way he used it was in the phrase “a little leaven leavens the whole lump,” which was probably a common proverb in the first century. In I Corinthians 5, Paul used it to warn against the church tolerating the incestuous sexual lifestyle of one of its members. If you keep on disregarding the badness of this, he told them, soon you’ll have not just one case of this, but a whole church full of it, because “a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” Similarly in Galatians 5, where the problem was not behavioral but theological: there were people who were spreading false doctrine, insisting that since Jesus called his disciples from among the Jews, everyone needed to become Jewish in order to live as his followers. Paul rejected that way of thinking, and urged the church not to accept this teaching, not even a bit, because “a little leaven leavens the whole lump.”

So the idea gets used in the Bible both ways. A little leaven – a little bit of a good thing – will transform the whole lump into bread dough, ready to be shaped and risen into loaves to bake and then to feed the hungry. A little bit of good will work its way through the whole thing, and make a difference in many lives. On the other hand, a little bit of bad will do likewise: it will percolate all the way around, and make a difference in many lives.

So. Here’s the thing about cleaning the kitchen. It looks like you could just do one thing, and then you could come back later and do the rest. But if you really do one part – maybe a counter, maybe the stove top – then that part looks good, but the contrast with its neighbor is embarrassing, so you feel drawn to clean the next part, too. And it’s not satisfying to clean that next part just pretty well. Even though it is already way better than it was, you can’t quite count it as a win until you’ve scrubbed it and made it shine. And so you end up working your way around the whole kitchen, surface by surface, utensil by utensil, because each time you clean one space and make it just right, the next surface says “Don’t forget about me! Clean me, too!”

I’d like to round this off and say, “And so, children, before you know it, the kitchen will be gleaming!” But that’s not true. It doesn’t happen before you know it. You know full well that you have been suckered into it. You know what’s happening to yourself. You know that you decided you’d just do one thing, no more than three minutes, and here you are almost half an hour later, and wow, the kitchen looks so much better, but you’ve gone much farther than your original quick three minute one-spot-only plan.

I scrubbed out the two pans in the sink, dried them, and put them in their cabinet. I surveyed my realm. The dishwasher was running. The counters were spotless. The stove top was glistening. And I saw that I needed to sweep the floor. It’s easy to sweep the middle; it takes longer to get in all the corners. Kitchens have a lot of little corners to them. Then sweeping it all into the dustpan, and dumping it into the trash. That filled the kitchen trash bag to the brim, so I pulled it out of its barrel, tied it, and carried it out to the rolling cart by the garage. I just needed to put a new bag in the kitchen barrel, and I was done.

Except there was that one spot that wouldn’t sweep up, something was stuck to the kitchen tile there. I got out the mop, ran hot water over it, squeezed it out, and scrubbed that spot on the floor. What was that, exactly, that was stuck there? It’s better not to know, I thought; don’t ask questions if you don’t want to know the answer. I leaned on the mop a little harder, and the spot was clean.

Of course, it was now a little too clean. This oval, a little larger than the size of the mop head, was noticeably cleaner than the area around it. I wanted to throw the mop down in the middle of the kitchen floor. I wanted to throw the mop right out the window. Instead, I sighed, filled the sink with hot soapy water, and started mopping the rest of the kitchen floor.

All in all, I walked out of the kitchen almost two hours after I said I’d just do a little three minute spot cleaning. I tried to encourage myself, trying to focus on how good the kitchen looked, but knowing that this was a very temporary condition. The kitchen will never stay clean for long. But I had also experienced again an important truth. You can decide you’re going to clean for just three minutes, and leave the rest for later: but once you clean even a little bit, the next spot over demands to receive the same attention. A little leaven leavens the whole lump: once you start to clean one spot in the kitchen, it percolates along to clean a little more, and a little more, until the whole kitchen is clean.

It turns out that you can apply this principle in a number of areas in your life. If you’ve decided you should take a half hour walk every day, you may have a hard time getting motivated to do that. So just decide to put on your sneakers. That takes only a minute. Then you can decide to step out the door and do some stretches for a minute on the front porch steps. Well, might as well walk to the far end of the block. And when you get to the corner, turn and walk another block. You can always turn back. But somehow you don’t, and you got your thirty minute walk in, by going on a little farther as you came to each moment when you might have turned around and quit.

I’ve found it that way with writing. Often I don’t feel inspired, not at all in the mood to write, but I sit down and say that I’m just going to write a hundred words. But by the time I’ve done that, I see a little more clearly what I’m trying to write, so I keep on. On a good day that can turn into 600 or 800 words, or even more. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. On an average day it’ll come to 400 or 500 words. And meh, sometimes it’s only 100 or 200. Still, the general principle works. “A little leaven leavens the whole lump. The kingdom of heaven is like mixing in the leaven.”

John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople in the year 400, preached his way through the Gospel of John, verse by verse, 88 sermons in all. At the beginning of his 31^st sermon in the series, he offered this comment:

Chrysostom was not preaching on the yeast in the batch of dough, nor about cleaning the kitchen; he was on the last two verses of John chapter 3, verses 35 and 36, which are about how “the Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand.” He could have gotten all poetic and theological about this, but instead he gave us these useful lines about step-by-step diligence. It’s about this same insight: you don’t do it all at once, with an invocation like “Kitchen: be clean! Bih – bshshshshsh!” Instead, you take on one single piece of it. One step. That leads to another step. Just put on your sneakers. All right, go outside and stretch for a minute. It’s like a woman making bread. A little leaven leavens the whole lump.

I could learn my lesson, and always clean the kitchen as soon as anything happens there, so that it’s always clean. For too many years to count I’ve known that that’s the way to do it, but it has never happened that way, and I don’t think it’s going to start now. But leaving a few dirty dishes untended is asking for a dirty kitchen. “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.” That means that a few dirty dishes will turn into a sinkful of dirty dishes, plus pans on the stove and that little smear of … something … on the stove top. And corn flakes and an empty milk carton on the table.

So, the kitchen looks nice right now. Its perfect order and cleanliness will disappear over the next couple of days, and I’ll be lazy and do nothing about it, and then it will once again be in serious need.

I think I’ve figured out a solution, though. When the mess in the kitchen gets to be too much – I’ll just pack a bag and move out.

No. I don’t really think that. I think I’ll remember that the kingdom of heaven is like mixing in the yeast, and eventually the whole batch of dough is raised and ready to shape into loaves to feed the hungry. And cleaning the kitchen works the same way. As Chrysostom said, “This is how we establish our life in Christ: step by step.”