The Grace Found in a Prank -or- God is a Trickster

Last weekend, some seminary friends visited from Chicago.  The occasion was my installation as pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church, Toluca, IL.  I gave them a tour of the parsonage, my home.  It was a busy day with family and church family, so I didn’t notice how they tended to linger in various rooms.  After they departed, I found that they had...altered things.  They left notes in my office--one saying they had also deposited a snake for me to find...or to find me, I suppose.  My bed was short-sheeted.  My remote controls for the TV and DVD player were missing.  Books were rearranged on the shelves in my library.  I am still finding things out of place.  I had been thoroughly pranked.

I am not one much for pranks.  I am neither good at nor fain to prank others, and I usually don’t enjoy being pranked.  But this time, I am reluctant to admit, I loved it.  And it got me thinking about pranks, and their goodness.  

The pranks my friends played were not hurtful or mean, per se.  A couple were rather more annoying than the others, but it is nice to be annoyed from time to time.  The pranks were meant to be gestures of love--believe it or not.  By that I mean, these friends took the time to mess with me, and they trusted that I would react in good humor.  

As I reflect, the prank has the following properties and effects:

1. In pranking me, my friends gave a great deal of attention to me, my habits, and my stuff.  They targeted, and moved, those things that were of especial importance to me.  

2. In pranking me, my friends showed their trust.  They trusted our relationship, that it would survive despite some minor annoyances and material adjustments.  They trusted my personality, that I would see the humor in their gestures and wouldn’t fly off the handle.

3. In pranking me, my friends crossed the boundaries of solitude.  They studied and interacted with my things, and with my habits.  They studied my environment closely.  They also crossed over into my vulnerability.

4. Finding that I was pranked, I was able to laugh at my friends and their ridiculous sense of humor, but also I was able to laugh at myself.  I was able to laugh at my own discomfort with having my stuff messed with.  And I was able to laugh, imagining how gleeful my friends must have been as they did all of these things.

5. The pranks were the lingering presence of my friends long after they had left.  The prank is evidence that someone has been here, someone has come so close to another individual that their life is altered, both in the superficial way, and in a more profound way.  And finding something new amiss each day, made me think of my friends...and miss them...and appreciate their visit.

6. Pranks, at their best, create an enjoyment of life, particularly the mundane parts of life.  And, again at their best, pranks allow us to laugh at the most despairing and dreadful thing in life: our all too human vulnerability and lack of control over the world around us.  That laughter helps reconcile us to our all too human condition.

I suppose I could go on, but I will leave off on the analysis of the prank for now.  In any event, meditating on the pranks of my friends, I started to think about how God is a prankster.  I wrote this some six years ago for an assignment in preaching class.  I use the words “prankster” and “trickster” synonymously.  The point, of course, is that God is a trickster that not only wants to remind us of our powerlessness and vulnerability (that all of our plans and considerations and categories are in vain), but God wants to remind us of this in ways that will make us comfortable with being who we are...comfortable with being what God created us to be: merely human.  And lastly, the Prankster does what the Prankster does in order to invite us into the joke--into joy and relationship and interaction.  Every prankster loves a partner...every prankster loves it when the one being pranked gives it back a little (of course, no one likes someone who pranks too well.)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy, here it is:   

I have decided that God is, at heart, a trickster.

And this is a biblical view of God.

Christians ought to reclaim that word…”trickster.”

God is not a scoundrel, though he associates with them.

God does not lie, cheat or steal, though he hangs out with the crowd that does.

In fact, if God were not God, none of us would believe; who would trust anyone who reputedly 
      socializes with rascals, sinners and scoundrels?

God loves pranks:

Remember when Jacob stole the blessing of his brother?

Esau ought to be given what is his; who does Jacob think he is?  Yet God favored Jacob.

Remember when God crowned David, the progeny of a woman who prostituted herself off to her  
       father-in-law in order to produce a child and heir?

Yet David, Solomon and, yes, even Jesus came from the bold, morally questionable 

cleverness of Tamar.  (No wonder we need to tell ourselves stories of Mary’s purity!)

God is a trickster, all right.

Not the sort that plays jokes on the powerless just for a mean laugh.

Not the sort of trickster that feels mirth in the suffering of others.

Instead God is the trickster that laughs at the haughty and the dreadfully powerful.

God revels in the unexpected and the paradoxical.

God’s possibilities are so much greater than our narrow expectations that most of life becomes ironic…
      well, from our perspective.

God experiences joy when we figure out that God doesn’t play by the rules of our game.

How ridiculous!  A king born in a cow’s food trough?

Later the baby-man would say: “I am the bread of life.”  We eat the flesh...maybe the food trough  was 
      a good choice after all.

Go play with God; enjoy the mischief of the deity!