Uncomplicated - The Rev. Joanna Leiserson

Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

Life is so complicated. It has so many experts, so much advice. We want to live well. We want to do well. So we turn to the experts. And so that's my excuse for telling you about the other day when I went with friends to a Chinese restaurant. I don't usually meet for Chinese. I like my cooking just fine. But the restaurants have one thing that I don't have, fortune cookies. It used to be that those little slips of paper inside the fortune cookies contained real fortunes. Like the ones that come from the Zotar fortune teller booth at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Fortunes like, good news will come to you today. Or, you will discover your hidden talent. Or, you Romance will come soon.At some point, they morphed into little three inch pieces of wisdom. Like the one I got once that said, Just because others are bad does not imply that you are good. If that cookie weren't cut in half, it might have seen me look hurt.But I think that the messages in those cookies try to take their wisdom, such as it is, from the old masters. Sometimes there's something there, so we hope. So last Tuesday with great anticipation, of course I cracked open my fortune cookie and it said, I kid you not.It said, "Things in life should be simple rather than complicated." Channeling Jesus, I wondered. Funny. Did that fortune cookie just read my mind? It's not that complicated. You are surrounded by all these authorities. You have Teachers, Pharisees. Rabbis, but in the end, it's simple in your spiritual life as a faithful child of God, you have one teacher, one authority, one path, one goal.