Greetings St. Mark’s Family! Greetings on this April 1st Friday, 2022.
This is no April Fool’s message—no tricks! No hoaxes! But today is popularly known as “April Fool’s Day” and is a day for the trickster in all of us to show up and act out. Many of us have some trickster impulse in us from speaking some sly subtle deceit to concocting an outrageous trick on someone. When I was a kid, someone at school had plastic vomit that ended up in the principal’s office. Have I mentioned that the principal was my Daddy? So the pretend vomit came home with him, and my friend Jane and I had many laughs with it. Many of us have been to camp and experienced short-sheeting or plastic-covered toilets or our underwear hanging out the window. Playing tricks was never my forte. I always managed to give it away somehow. It isn’t that I can’t keep a secret, but I have trouble keeping a straight face while someone is about to be tricked. And I really hate being the one tricked. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who actually likes being tricked! Do you?
I do know lots of people who seem to think God is a trickster. They may think God puts us in difficult situations so we can fail. Or maybe God sends us a terrible illness or causes an accident or sends a tornado or tsunami. Sometimes God blesses the slot machine at the casino or the scratch ticket at the 7-11 so we win big, and other times God turns a blind eye while we lose. Such thinking makes God a trickster, actively manipulating our lives and our world to the detriment of some and benefit of others. This Sunday we will read about Judas as trickster—pretending honesty and caring when thievery and deceit are on his mind and in his heart.
The idea of the trickster—the archetype of trickster—is real. Many wisdom and mythic traditions make room for a figure who carries this energy and insight. It reflects an aspect of human personality, a quality that explains how and why some people act the way they do. Think, for example, the wolf in grandmother’s clothing in the folktale, Little Red Riding Hood. Another example is the whole population that agrees that the Emperor’s new clothes are beautiful until a wise young child points out that the Emperor is naked.
Trickery can be relatively harmless—a gentle tease followed by a laugh and a loving hug. Or it can cause deep and lasting harm. An extreme form is what we call “bullying”. The bully plays tricks with an intention to harm in order to gain power over victims. The bully’s damaging tricks vary from physical to mental to emotional wounding.
The archetype of trickster is intending to teach, to warn. It warns about the potential for deceit and, hopefully, teaches caution and discernment. Many people seem to have missed this lesson. Otherwise, we would not have entire subcultures falling for really fake news and conspiracy theories and believing blatant, reality-defying lies. And we would not have powerful bullies killing children and elders and destroying our earth and culture.
Lent is nearing the end, and Holy Week is coming soon when we will be remembering the bullying of Jesus, the tricks played on him to try to reveal weakness and to undermine his message and model of a new way of life. We must admit, some of his behavior did defy expectation, did seem unexplainable. We call those miracles, not tricks. Nothing Jesus ever did had intention to harm though he did invite us all into the power of God’s love. This is a receptive power, a shared power. The more you love, the more love there is. The more you give love away, the more love grows. There is no end to love. Love is infinite. Love is eternal. Go ahead, give some away today.
God Bless You!
Rev. Nancy