Pipert Sound Church, last week we kicked off our spring practice on simplicity. If you were

not here, I would invite you to go back and listen to part one as it's the baseline for

our entire practice. For part two, please turn in your Bibles right now to Luke chapter 12

and give me a few minutes to set up our text. Life is complex and not to sound cynical,

but anyone who tells you otherwise is likely trying to sell you something. The human brain was

hardwired by God at a neurobiological level to synthesize vast amounts of electrical impulses

and simplify it all down to a focal point. Now, some of us are better at this than others.

Monks are the best ninja level, but after the monks, the people I know who best optimize this latent

human capacity are advertisers. Years ago, I got to sit in on a branding meeting with some high

level ad agency execs and watch them coax the leaders of an organization to articulate in one line

what their organization was all about and in all honesty, it was pure genius. And branding is a great

strategy. If you run a business and your goal is to sell a product or a service, it's great,

but I am not a brand and neither are you. We are human beings and human nature is complex

and it's full of paradox and ambiguity and tension and open-ended questions. So it would be

really easy to mistake the practice of simplicity as just another Western capitalistic attempt to

truncate the mystery of the human condition, but it's not. The opposite of simplicity isn't

complexity, it's superficiality. It's a life that is trivial, vain, a femoral. The choice is not

between a simple life and a complex one, but between a deep life and a shallow one, or life of focus

and a life of distraction. And few people, if we are honest, ever achieve a simple life. One of the

precious few was the 20th century Quaker intellectual Thomas Kelly. And he does a great job of capturing

that nagging fear that so many of us live with in the Western modern world. Quote, we feel honestly

the pull of many obligations and we tried to fulfill them all, but we are unhappy, uneasy,

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