Jack McKinney

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church

May 13, 2007 – Sixth Sunday of Easter

Text: Acts 16:9-15

The Holy Trickster

If I ever have the time and inclination to write an account of my years as a pastor of Pullen Church, I doubt I will spend much time describing the big events that happened in these years. Nor will I dedicate a great deal of space to major decisions the church made or did not make. I will leave these weighty matters to others. What I would prefer to focus on would be the good tricks that I have pulled off, or been the victim of, in my years as your pastor.

For instance, not long after my arrival at Pullen our Church Administrator at the time, Ben Franklin, doctored a piece of junk mail from the Carter Center in Atlanta to make it appear like a personal letter from President Carter to me. In a delicious piece retribution, it just so happened that President Carter was coming to Raleigh for a book signing not long after that. With the help of some friends I was able to convince Ben and other staff members that President Carter was going to visit Pullen while he was in town. I still get tickled thinking about Ben’s earnest desire to make sure everything was right for the President’s visit. When Robert McMillan walked in holding a picture of President Carter in front of his face Ben laughed hardest of all knowing that he had been had.

Honesty requires me to admit that I have been the target of most of the tricks. One year Joe Reed borrowed my robe so that during Pullen Home Companion he could act like he was me in the pulpit. The funniest part of the skit was that all the audience could hear was a female voice from offstage pretending to give expression to what KaKi is thinking when I preach. The voice said things like, “No Jack, please, not another story about Texas!”

Another time some of the kids from the youth group visited our house late one night and stuck several hundred plastic forks in our front yard. I thought that one was very original. By the way, if any of those kids are home from college and in church this morning, let me just say I’m still plotting my revenge.

Then there was the one where I was a two-time victim of a trick involving a set of steer horns. Steve Smith taped these horns to the grill of my car one day, which started a chain reaction as these horns started showing up in different surprising places. The joke ended back on me, however, when I came out to preach one Sunday morning only to find these horns taped underneath the pulpit. Yes, I preached an entire sermon from this pulpit with steer horns wrapped around my knees. I’m telling you, some Sundays preaching is harder work than it appears.

In the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible we are told that we are created in the image of God. We are usually comforted by this thought. People of faith attribute virtues like love, compassion, generosity, and kindness to the spark of the Divine that resides in all of us. But clearly we creatures of the Great Creator have other drives and passions in us than these benevolent virtues. What do we say about our fascination with and participation in trickery? Is this, too, part of our creation in God’s image? Well, as outrageous and unlikely as that might sound to most of us, many religions of the world would answer yes.

The idea of God as trickster is found in many different religious traditions. For the Greeks, Hermes was the arch-Trickster; in Native American culture the Trickster is represented by different figures, the coyote being perhaps the most famous. Carl Jung explored the concept of the Trickster as our shadow side. And if you think the Judeo-Christian tradition is devoid of images of God as Trickster I would simply ask you if you have ever read the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, only to call it off at the last minute. Indeed, the book of Job in the Bible is one of the greatest stories of divine trickery found in any religion.

But why would we even care to think about the possibility of God as Trickster? Especially considering that in many of these traditions the Trickster figure appears almost devoid of ethics or morals. The Trickster can be crude and cruel, hardly the divine attributes we associate with the Christian faith. But here’s the thing. A trick has a way of turning everything upside down and surprising us in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. The best tricks are ones that we don’t see coming but result in us learning a lesson we wouldn’t have otherwise. And if indeed God can be described as Trickster, it appears one of God’s favorite moves is to appeal to our inflated egos so that we go for the bait hook, line, and sinker.

Which brings me to our scripture reading this morning. We have read a rather innocuous text from the book of Acts describing the beginning of the Apostle Paul’s second missionary journey. Paul and his companions are visiting churches established on his first missionary trip when the apostle has a vision. In the dream Paul sees a man of Macedonia pleading with him to come over to Macedonia to “help us.” And that’s exactly what Paul does. He immediately sets course for Macedonia and ends up in Philippi. For the first time Paul finds himself in present-day Europe and the Christian faith is planted there when he baptizes a group of women outside of the city. So, what’s tricky about any of that?

Well, to see the trick you must remember the vision. Paul sees a vision of a man pleading for his help. In response, not knowing any more than someone needs “his” help, he risks a dangerous voyage and arduous trip to Philippi. Once he arrives there, some things don’t add up. Until this point, when Paul planted churches he would go to the synagogue in a city and interact with the Jewish men. Only in Philippi, there is apparently no synagogue. So, on the Sabbath Paul goes outside the city and finds a group of women praying. Scholars debate whether these women were Jewish converts or simply god-fearing Gentiles, but the bigger point to pay attention to is that they are women not men. And they are led by a woman named Lydia. Here is what we know about this woman from these few short verses. She is a person of means as she owns a business trading in purple cloth. Such cloth would have been sold only to affluent individuals. She is also a homeowner as she invites Paul to come and stay at her home after he baptizes her. In a world where 90 percent of people were peasants, and men dominated all aspects of society, Paul has stumbled across an independent woman of means who takes him into her home. And here is the last interesting tidbit to this story. After this encounter, as Paul traveled around preaching the gospel and starting churches, he refused to accept financial support from any of the fledgling congregations he started. Except one. The church in Philippi. It seems Paul’s first convert, Lydia, became his benefactor and made possible much of his work from that point forward.

Do you see the Divine Trickster at play in the story? Appealing to Paul’s ego to come over to Macedonia and help, Paul encounters a situation he could not have predicted. Yes, he does his part in preaching and baptizing, but in the long run he is the one who is truly helped. And yes, those women were changed by Paul’s visit, but his encounter with the independent, strong Lydia may have affected him far more than anything he did for them. Especially in light of the fact that by the time he gets to Rome Paul appears comfortable with women leading in the church. Do you see the element of the unexpected lying just beneath the surface of this story? Do you see the surprise factor? Do you see that in the end everything is turned upside down from what you might expect?

Such is the life of faith. Many of us can recall times in our lives when we responded to appeals for our help, determined to do something good and generous for those less fortunate than ourselves, and by the time everything was said and done we were the ones profoundly changed. We were the ones who ended up learning a life lesson we would have missed otherwise. I am convinced this is God the Trickster at play in our lives. The Trickster appeals to our ego and our sense of the heroic not only so we can do something good for someone else, but so we can be turned upside down and inside out.

I’ve seen this happen to many of us over the years with our connections to Cuba, Zimbabwe, and other places where we think of people having less than we do. We go on these trips interested in encountering a new culture and seeing how we can be of assistance to our struggling sisters and brothers. Only what happens to us is that we discover we are the struggling sisters and brothers who have much to gain from the people in these very different cultures. We are the ones who are changed. We are the ones learning the important spiritual lessons. The Trickster woos us with the same Macedonian vision that got Paul to make his trip long ago. We go to help, but God knows we are the ones in need of the help.

Mothers probably have a better sense of the Divine Trickster than the rest of us. Many of the mothers here today went to extraordinary lengths to have a child or adopt a child. The only thing is, and I say this as one who has watched this process up close for 14 years, once you actually have a child everything is, how shall we say, blown to pieces. It’s hard, thankless work accompanied by little sleep and little relief. And as parents of teenagers will tell you, those are the easy years. I think if we polled the mothers here today what we might hear are stories of heartache as well as delight, stories of failure as well as success, and unquestionably many stories of unexpected surprise. But what we might hear most consistently is that these women’s lives have been profoundly shaped and changed in ways they never could have expected when their urge to raise a child was originally fulfilled.

I know that the image of God as Trickster might seem strange or even offensive to some of us. A trick brings with it connotations of deception that make such an image difficult to consider. But if we are honest, and look at ourselves objectively, we will have to acknowledge that our lives are marked by unexpected turns, paradoxical reversals, and surprising lessons that come to us when we aren’t even looking. The trick makes us wake up and pay attention. And if there is one thing God the Trickster is trying to get us to do, it is pay attention.

Someday, when I write about all the tricks I have experienced in my years at Pullen, the ones I hope to note won’t just be about Jimmy Carter or steer horns under the pulpit. No the tricks I hope to remember are the ones the Divine Trickster played on me so that I would start paying attention.