  This morning I baked four loaves of bread: two classic sourdough and two banana walnut, all out of my urlLink aforeblogged cheater starter . I started out planning to make one loaf to use up all the co-op’s extra bananas, but with bread, things quickly get out of hand. Read on and you’ll see what I mean here. File this blog under the heading "busy work for the hands creates odd analogy adventures. " Feeding and kneading the dough are my favorite parts of the process because they remind me of preparing clay in the potters’ studio. In fact, up until this year’s maternally-inspired baking adventure, the clay ovens were the only ovens I’ve ever used. Kneading dough feels and looks just like kneading clay, so while kneading today I began to wonder why Jesus talked about potters’ clay instead of bakers’ dough. Dough seems much more prevalent in life than clay. Even if he never made dough himself, which seems unlikely since he was a bachelor and often spent time all alone, surely he saw his mom, sisters, and aunts make dough. The products of dough and clay are different in that, after cooking, one’s empty and breakable and the other is edible and filling.
Now that I think about it, I like the imagery of humans as the empty, breakable ones. People should heed this and treat each other as the delicate, priceless vases we are. Maybe Jesus just had to save that kneading bread analogy for his big finish--the symbolic cannibalism, as it’s called in the business. Using it in a parable would be a tacky and confusing double entendre, would muddle the message of the good book later. The simplest explanation for the use of clay in the parable is that Jesus must have gotten to know a potter amid his nomadic travels. This fits into my romantic view of Jesus on the road, watching carefully the livelihoods of those he chanced to meet and then weaving those encounters into parables. In this way, I think Jesus was like tofu: he took the flavor of his surroundings and, with his substance, made it a palatable, fulfilling product.
It brings to mind Paul’s experience later in the Gospels when he’s in Greece and he claims the unmarked alter as his God’s, saying people teaching others about God have to be all things to all people. That’s a lesson urlLink Christians today seem to have forgotten, instead taking up the practices of the pharisees Jesus rebuked for their tightly clenched anuses, their rigid attitudes regarding laws, service, and worship. The urlLink most visible Christians in our society define themselves by what morals they stand against (gay marriage, abortion, sex ed) rather than focussing on the ties that bind them to our culture. Surely a key reason kneading bread put me on track to examine Christianity today is that Christianity, when brought down to its most primary place in humanity, is beautiful.
As the religious tradition of my culture, I want to claim it and love it. When it looks like an outgrowth of Jesus and his followers, something that started over baking and talking, begging a room in a stranger's house for the night and then asking that stranger to hit the road with them in the morning; when it's as basic as homemade bread, it's a religion that I can conscionably pass on to my children. But instead, organized Christianity today is an obvious outgrowth of beurocratic religious systems, a stump for political bias, a bullying platform that keeps people down and/or out. It's the market on the synagogue steps. But all I want is the bread. 
