Watching for the Mischief Makers©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
August 24, 2025

“Eat, coat. Eat.”

Throughout human history, and across cultures, we have always enjoyed the imagination and the vitality of tall tales about the mischief-makers. These are the characters, sometimes human, sometimes divine, sometimes animals, who exist to change our thinking just a bit, as Mullah Nasruddin did in our story a minute ago. His beautiful coat was welcome at the feast, he decided. Not him. The characters, and their stories, are meant to disrupt us, offer us a different way to see the world, and our place in it. We call these characters our tricksters. Some are well-known across cultures – for example, the Greek God Hermes, the messenger. Hermes, son of Zeus, who on the day of his birth was said to have stolen Apollo’s cattle, disguising their hoof prints by putting sandals on them and making them walk backwards. When Apollo caught up to him, Hermes delighted him with a lyre, which he had just invented, traded it for the cattle, and then returned to his cradle. Was Apollo better off? It’s not clear.

We can go all the way back to the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible to see Satan as a trickster: a trickster and a shape-shifter. As a serpent, Satan appears to Eve and convinces her to eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. And nothing for humans is ever the same again. Were humans better off as a result? On the one hand, they had more freedom and knowledge. On the other hand, they were banished from the Garden. In the case of Apollo, on the one hand, your cattle are stolen. On the other hand, you’re given the gift of music.

Nothing is ever quite clear when a trickster is involved, whether human or supernatural. Their role is to change the status quo, to create just enough chaos so that the creative forces of life have a chance to emerge, to seize the moment.

Sometimes, in the trickster archetype, or model, there is a moral lesson, as in the tale of Nasruddin feeding his coat. Sometimes, the stories are meant to be cautionary. In the indigenous Abenaki tradition, the trickster is a raccoon named Azeban. In one tale, Azeban approaches a waterfall and decides that he can shout loudly enough to drown out the roar of the water. So he shouts as loudly as he can, loses his balance and falls into the stream. Azeban offers a message of caution, and also of humility. You think you’re more powerful than a waterfall?

Tricksters usually are active at the margins. You won’t find them where everything is calm and peaceful, where people have all they need, but rather, we find them where things need to be stirred up. They emerge where change is called for, where there are obstacles put in the path of people that need to be circumvented. Think about Nasruddin’s tomb – with a locked gate, and no fence. Tricksters break down barriers, and cross boundaries.

Often, tricksters are involved in thievery, as we saw with Hermes. In fact, two myths in very different traditions tell of stealing fire from the gods to give to humans. Perhaps you have heard the tale of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from Mount Olympus to give to people. He was severely punished by Zeus: chained to a rock and forced to suffer the fate of having an eagle tear out his liver, which regenerated each night so that the torture was repeated daily.

A similar tale is told about Coyote; a trickster figure important to indigenous peoples of North America. Coyote once observed humans grieving for the deaths they experienced during the frigid winter, and decided to find a way to steal fire from the Fire Beings to bring to the humans. He enlisted his animal friends, and together, they stole a burning coal and kept it away from the pursuing Fire Beings long enough to carry it to people. Legend has it that a burning stick wielded by a Fire Being touched Coyote’s tail, and that is why to this day coyotes have a black tip on their tail.

Tricksters force us to ask the question of whether it is always wrong to steal. What if something beneficial for many is being hoarded by a few?

In English-speaking traditions, the legends of Robin Hood are perhaps the best known. The stories of his pursuits in Sherwood Forest with his large band of Merry Men have been told for centuries. We can all probably say together what Robin Hood was most famous for: he stole from the rich, and gave to the poor. Was he a hero or a villain? Well, maybe he’s both, because, with a trickster it’s never clear.

The stories of theft I’ve been sharing have something in common. In each case, the trickster figure crosses boundaries in order to help people achieve more, or thrive. The hoarders of fire – the gods of Mount Olympus and the Fire Beings, fear losing their divine status if ordinary humans are allowed to use something as critical as fire. Tricksters work to disrupt the narratives, try to level the playing field, to break down barriers.

The presence of tricksters continues into modern times. One mischief-maker emerged in the American South in the 19th century – a rabbit known as Br’er Rabbit. It’s believed that the mischief tales of a rabbit that could outsmart animals that were bigger and stronger than he were handed down among African peoples, brought to the United States as slaves. Imagine the enormous appeal of a character able to outwit those with more power.

Again, we see the dynamic of finding ways to take power away from those who hold it, to disrupt, to find ways to unstop the life force and help it to flow where it is needed.

In the 20th century, as the role of mass entertainment has grown, Br’er Rabbit has led us to Bugs Bunny. And also in the realm of cartoons, the Road Runner and of course, Wile E. Coyote. Let’s not forget about The Joker in Batman. Like life, tricksters evolve and change, seeking new wisdom, new relevance.

The 20th century also saw cataclysmic wars, and the efforts of ordinary people to disrupt, to slow the progress of invasions. I am not sure that the stories of the Resistance in World War 2, for example, would qualify as trickster behavior. The stakes were life and death. But again, we ask ourselves: did we think it heroic to destroy property, to forge documents, to lie, and to steal?

I think we do, at least after the fact.

Of course, all this leads us to today, in a time with more than the usual amount of chaos. We’ve learned that in times of upheaval, the trickster archetypes are likely to be present. Where are we seeing disruption; sand dumped in the gears? Where do we see attempts to take away power that is being hoarded by those who might confuse themselves with the gods on Olympus? Who do we see disrupting old norms? I think of LGBTQ+ Pride events as perfect examples of trickster energy at work. Drag queens, more than anyone else, are today’s tricksters. They do no harm, but they shift our thinking. They show up in new ways. They move society to new norms and new acceptance, and they spread joy.

One of my favorite actions this past spring was the Tesla Takedowns at Tesla dealerships in the U.S. and Canada, and in parts of Europe. One took place every Saturday morning at the Tesla dealership in Peabody all throughout the spring. And we saw the results, as Tesla sales and stock prices plummeted, and ultimately, helped billionaire Elon Musk, Tesla’s owner, to decide that government service wasn’t quite worth the trouble and expense.

Tricksters work to spread out wealth and power rather than accumulate it, and to shift boundaries. So when Elon Musk tried to buy an election for the State of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court this past April 1, which is also known as April Fool’s Day, and contributed $25 million, people turned out in force to spurn Musk’s candidate, and elected the Democrat instead. And Musk found that there was a limit to his power.

Do you see mischief-makers at work? Might you be one of them?

As many of us know, the expression we use most often in talking about efforts to spread out power and wealth is to ‘make good trouble.’ This was a saying of our late Congressman John Lewis, a Civil Rights advocate who as a student helped organize the voting rights marches in Alabama back in 1965, and suffered a broken skull when the marchers were charged by local law enforcement. This was the first of many arrests and many injuries over a long career of, as he put it, ‘speaking up, speaking out, and getting in the way.’ He called civil disobedience ‘good trouble, necessary trouble.’ John Lewis might not meet the classic definition of a trickster; his role was always public, never ambiguous, or comic. But when it came to shifting boundaries and removing barriers, especially barriers to voting for millions of American citizens, John Lewis was second to none in resolve and resilience in creating conditions that allowed humans to reach their potential.

There are always mischief-makers, if we are looking for them. I was reminded recently of the actions of Bree Newsome, the young woman who in 2015, just after the shooting by a white supremacist at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, climbed a flagpole at the state capitol to remove the Confederate flag. She was promptly arrested. But just days later the South Carolina House of Representatives voted to remove the Confederate flag permanently. And all the charges against Bree Newsome were dropped.

Mischief continues. As you probably have heard, the American president has ordered troops onto the streets of Washington, D.C. to quell crime and violence, which in fact, is dropping. Last week it was reported that police set up a checkpoint to stop drivers in one neighborhood, and the neighbors showed up down the street with signs warning of the checkpoint ahead. They successfully diverted all the traffic, and the police left.

In ways large and small, people all across the country, including right here on Cape Ann, are doing what they can to give some power back to those who have so little.

My friends, in these times we should be alert for the presence of mischief makers. Who do you know who demands to be heard? Who is defying neighborhood norms and planting wildflowers in their lawn? Who brings petitions to church for signatures? Who is trying out a new name, or a new way of dressing? Who is making you uncomfortable?

How can each of us help spread out power? How can we use our privilege to shift the energy, and the narrative, one person at a time?

My friends, throughout human history, there have been those who have tried to amass wealth and power. In our society today we are seeing a strong resurgence of that impulse to hoard, to redistribute wealth until only the very richest control the resources, and who try to grasp the reins of political power away from the majority of us. Because of these impulses, we see across all cultures and time periods the presence of beings whose role it is to take wealth and power back, to redistribute it in ways large and small. It might feel impossible to fight the power that is being sought. But we can be observant, and look for the many small ways in which people are disrupting, creating mischief, and making good trouble. May we each find ways to do all that we can to be tricksters, to be Holy Disrupters, and to honor those we find in our midst.

May it be so.

With gratitude for the inspiration of the Reverend Leela Sinha in zir 2025 Berry Street lecture, “Tricksters and Tyrannies.”