Sermon 62 - Trickster
Acts 17:22-23
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you."
2 Corinthians 1:4
who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
Romans 6:1
What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?
Job 40:6,7
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm:
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
Let us now praise famous famous gods!
Okay, that may sound a little strange, given that this is a sermon addressed to Christians, and we worship the one and only true God. However, a number of Christian authors and philosophers have turned to the various polytheistic theologies, in order to explore the nature of the one God, and illustrate various aspects of His nature.
It doesn't tend to matter which of the various polytheistic mythologies that you choose. They all tend to have fairly common types of gods that keep being represented, over and over again, in the various mythologies. Archetypes.
There is, for example, the father god. Or, sometimes, the creator god. Or, in more generic parlance, probably the CEO god. This is the god who is nominally in charge of the other gods. This may be illustrative of the creative power of God, or the ultimate power of God, or, possibly, the sovereignty and lordship of God.
There are often female gods, sometimes mother, sometimes virgin, representative of love, or fertility, or productivity, or possibly order, comfort, and hearth-and-home: the stability of society. There are possibly gods of war, or battle, or thunder, or power of various types. There are gods of beauty, there are gods of justice, there are gods of pleasure, there are gods of all manner of good things. There are gods of the seas, there are gods of the forest, and all other created things. There are gods of mountains, there are gods of volcanoes. There are the messengers of the gods, reminding us to be prepared, and ready, for messages from God. All of the archetypes of the various polytheistic mythologies are representative of different aspects of God. After all, even if they get a little fuzzy on the details, they are all, as Paul pointed out, sincere attempts to *find* God, so they all tell us something *about* God.
And then there is the Trickster.
Pretty much all mythologies have a trickster god. This is an oddball god. This is a mischievous, and possibly unreliable god. This is a god that sometimes does good things, and sometimes does bad things. Possibly because of the inconsistency, the trickster tends to get mentioned an awful lot in different myths and legends. The trickster shows up in many pantheons of many mythologies. In Norse mythology he was Loki. In, well, not so much Greek mythology as paganism, he was Pan, embodied by J. M. Barrie in "Peter Pan." In many of the First Nations mythologies and stories the trickster is Raven. The trickster can be used, as a literary device, whenever you write yourself into a mythological corner, and need some way to get out of it. And, it's an awful lot of fun to have stories about someone where you're not really sure what the heck is going to happen. So the trickster gets used an awful lot in mythology, and the related myths.
What the heck are we to learn, about God, from the Trickster?
Some people will look at the fact that the trickster does bad things, and say that the trickster represents the devil. However, this really isn't consistent. The trickster sometimes does good things. And, of course, the devil never does. The devil is always opposed to God, and is, therefore, by definition, evil. The devil is never going to give us anything that's any good. The phrase "a deal with the Devil" means that even if we think we've got a good deal, there is some kind of problem with it, and it's going to turn out very badly for us. Now, of course, we do have stories where somebody supposedly makes a good deal with the devil, and gets the advantage of the devil, but that really isn't terribly theologically correct. That is turning the devil into a mere Trickster. So we are fooling ourselves in that case, and it doesn't really work.
We might be able to say that the trickster represents randomness. This represents the fact that we live in a complex, chaotic world, where bad things do happen. In that case, the trickster just represents the chaos of the world, and the fact that sometimes bad things happen, for no particular reason, and we have to make the best of it. Therefore, the trickster just represents chaos, and randomness.
If the trickster represents randomness, and chaos, and bad things happening to not particularly bad people for no particular reason at all, there is, probably, one lesson to take away from this. That is, that this is *our* opportunity to help. This is our opportunity to show our love for our neighbors. This is the time when we can help people who are worse off, in this disaster, than we are. Or people to whom disaster or distress has happened, even if it doesn't involve us. This we can do, if the trickster is just random.
But that rationale of, or explanation for, the trickster doesn't really work either. The trickster, in the mythologies, has a personality. The trickster is not simply chaos, or a roll of the dice, or a coin flip. The trickster is acting. The trickster is an agent. And besides, if we believe that God is all powerful, then we believe that God is in control of everything, even those things that are apparently random.
There is one other possibility. The trickster may represent the fact that we simply don't know enough about what is going on. After all, we are finite. God is infinite. We don't know the whole plan. Something that may look like it is bad, could, in fact, actually be good. It may even be good for *us*.
I have a few examples from my own life. The first is, I never wanted to be a teacher. The reason that I didn't want to be a teacher is that both of my parents were teachers. Now, looking back on it, they weren't particularly good teachers. Also, they didn't really love teaching. I don't think they even enjoyed teaching at all. They certainly didn't do a lot of teaching to us kids; their kids. They looked upon teaching as a job. My dad, one time, suggesting that I should, in fact, become a teacher, gave, as the reason for deciding on teaching for a career, the fact that you could put in your thirty years, get your pension, and then get out. I didn't think that that was particularly great career advice. So I didn't want to be a teacher.
And then circumstances conspired so that it seemed that probably teaching was the only career immediately available to me. And I became a teacher. And, pretty much right away, I realized two things. The first was that I had been teaching, in one way and another, for years. The second was that I absolutely loved teaching.
So, I got a job as a teacher. (No, I am not just simply going on with the first point, this is the second example.) And then I got fired. Now it's never fun getting fired. But I got fired at a time, and in such a way, that it seemed like I would never be a teacher, in the public education system, ever again. And I had, by this time, realized that I really loved teaching. So that seemed like a really bad situation. But a funny thing happened.
Because I had been fired from a teaching job, I got on to the Internet, way before most people got on to the Internet, and, in fact, before it was even *called* the Internet. Because I got fired, I had the opportunity to go and take a masters degree in information technology. In a program that wasn't really terribly well put together, and where I had to take a bunch of weird courses just to finish the requirements.
Because I got fired, when I did, at a time when it was difficult to get a job, I had to take all kinds of short-term contract jobs. In business, in industry, in government, even in academia. I didn't like this. I'm not someone who always wanted to be an independent contractor. I'm really happy with a nine-to-five job.
And because I got fired from teaching, and I was having a very hard time finding a job, and I was on the Internet, and I had taken a masters degree, in a field where I didn't know what you were, and weren't, supposed to take to prepare yourself for a career in that field, I got a very broad background, and I started to get interested in researching stuff in a field that I didn't yet know was called information security, and I started getting short-term contracts in that field, and eventually decided that I should take an exam to see if I could be certified as a professional in that field (mostly to see if I knew what I was talking about when I was advising people in the field), and because of the breadth of my background and a few other things, it turns out that I had close to a perfect background to become an instructor in the field. And so, because I got fired from teaching, I was able to teach, in the best teaching gig in the world, on six continents. (That's a way of saying "all over the world.")
Okay, if you think that two examples about teaching are too close together, I'll give you another, very personal, and rather embarrassing, one, that isn't about teaching.
I never had a girlfriend. I never had a girlfriend growing up. I never had a girlfriend in high school. I never had a girlfriend in university, and I was in university for rather a long time. I never had a girlfriend while I was teaching. I never had a girlfriend as I was trying to make my way in my early career path.
And then I met Gloria, and I proposed to her, and married her, so quickly that we could never figure out if we actually had a date, before we got married. So I don't even know if I had a girlfriend even then.
But, at some point, I realized that Gloria had not had the best experience with men. And the fact that she had been abandoned, and divorced, didn't do anything for her self-confidence, for herself as a woman. And, she let me know, at one point, the fact that I had never had a girlfriend was important to her. It meant that she had no competition. She was happy that I had never had a girlfriend. So all the years that I spent alone were not simply wasted years. That entire time, and the fact that I had never had a girlfriend, was something that I could offer to Gloria. And it was important to her. It was very good for her. So what had seemed, to me, for a number of years, as being bad, was, in fact, very good.
We don't know these things. We don't know these things in advance. Sometimes we don't know these things until long after the fact. It's quite possible that we may never know these things, in this life. We don't know the whole plan. We don't know the whole situation. We are not God.
There is a book, and a television series, by written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, called "Good Omens." It is about the end of the world. Almost. It's a little theologically questionable in the fact that an angel and a demon are teaming up to try to prevent the end of the world. The armies of heaven, in the persons of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are getting ready for the last battle, to destroy the world. And the angel, trying to prevent this, is arguing with another angel, who is the leader of the armies of heaven, who is preparing to destroy the Earth. And the angel, leading the armies of heaven, preparing to destroy the earth, is saying to the angel who is trying to prevent this, "well, this is the plan!"
"Ah!" says the lone angel, standing against this array of force and power. "But, is it the *ineffable* plan?"
We don't know. We make our plans, and our preparation. We may even think that we are doing the right thing, that we are doing what God wants. But we don't know everything. God knows everything. He knows what we should be doing. He knows where the plan is going. He knows that what looks like a terrible disaster is, in fact, just a platform from which he is going to build something even better. We don't know what that is.
So, we don't know when something that we think is bad, is, in fact, good. We don't know that beforehand. When something happens, and we think it's bad, God may be preparing something good. It might not happen right away. I was alone for fifteen years before I met Gloria. I thought, for twenty years, that I was finished with teaching. And as a matter of fact, even when I had started teaching all over the world, it took me another ten years to figure out what had happened. So what I saw as something bad, I didn't see as something good, for about thirty years.
Oh, you say, I seem to have wandered rather far from the Trickster. No, actually, I haven't. This is all part of the sermon plan.
(You didn't know that, did you?)
This is what the Trickster is teaching us. We don't know everything. We may not know everything, even after it happens. We may never know what the plan is, and what good is necessary from what we see as bad, in this lifetime.
Right now, I am a grieving widower. God has taken Gloria, and I am, once again, alone. Not only that, but the depression, against which I have fought all of my life, has returned, stronger than ever, and now no longer cyclical, so that it is constant. I am not enjoying life. You can read that as the greatest understatement of the century, if you like. I simply put it that way so as not to use vocabulary that nobody ever hears in church, in describing my situation. My life is terrible.
At least, *I* think it's terrible. I think it's bad. But I'm trying; and it is really, really hard; to have faith. To be humble before the fact that I do not know the whole story. I do not know the whole plan. I am trying to trust. And it is quite possible that I will not know why God is having me go through this, before I die. I am trying to trust.
And that, ultimately, is the lesson of the Trickster. The Trickster is not the god of mischief, no matter how the various mythologies have blurred the lesson. The Trickster is the god of humility, and faith, and trust.
God is in control. God is all powerful. In other sermons I have pointed out that God even uses our mistakes, for his good purposes. (I have to point out, along with Paul, that I am not saying that I should sin so that God's goodness can shine brighter.) God is almighty, and God loves us. God wants good things for us. If we are suffering now, it is because God has something better for us, later on. No matter how much later "later on" is. (This also isn't to say that we cannot do our best to help out someone who is in distress right now. Don't worry about messing up God's plan. You can't.)
The Trickster isn't a representation of the devil. The Trickster isn't just random. The Trickster, in terms of the lesson we should learn from him, is not simply a mischievous prankster. The Trickster is the god of humility, trust, and faith. And that is the lesson we need to learn.
No comments:
Post a Comment