More Bubble Tea & the Playfulness of God
Linda drank her first bubble tea last night. We went to the Ann Arbor Art Fair, and a Chinese restaurant was selling it. I bought one for her, and she gave me some sips. I am an expert on bubble tea, since in June I went to Chinatown in New York City and my Chinese hosts treated me to three bubble teas. Now I have tasted four bubble teas in my life. On the sweetness scale, last night’s was in third place for me.
Whoever invented bubble tea was, I feel certain, someone who was very playful and creative. An adult, I am sure, who had a childlike heart. Could anyone keep a straight face and say “I invented bubble tea?”
Now I am going to get very serious. Western Enlightenment culture Cartesianizes the creativity and playfulness out of kids. If, essentially and metaphysically, persons are really only “minds” who temporarily inhabit their physical bodies and use them like a driver operates a car, then getting emotional and getting physical is some ontologically contingent thing and not really part of life. So, kids get shaped into little “adults” who get big-time serious about this life, which means: repress all emotion and physical expression. For example, this past week I was in the mall here in Monroe watching a little kid laughing his head off. His laughing reminded me of my sons when they were little. And, his laugh was real loud. “Everybody” could hear him, and I actually saw him belly-laughing from the bottom of his jello-y gut. Then – horror! – his mother scuttled up to him, grabbed his arm, got low into his face and barked “You stop that laughing right now!” Why?
The church I grew up in was so Scandinavianly serious that if a kid would have smiled while taking communion he’d be in big trouble. Don’t laugh, smile, giggle, wiggle, enjoy, delight, frolic, play, run, dance, move, shout, twist, boogie, shuck or jive in church. All such behaviors and permutations of such behaviors are inappropriate.
Imagine my shock, growing up in an atmosphere like this, when I began to read the actual Bible.
- Psalm 63:3 (and a lot of other verses) says, “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.” Lift my hands… in church? I thought only religious wackos did that. The only reason I ever lifted a hand (and just one hand) in church was to suppress a yawn.
- Psalm 95:1 says, “Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.” If you know the worship song “Shout to the Lord,” think how weird it looks and how self-contradictory it is to have a whole congregation singing this song but never, ever, hearing anything that comes close to an actual shout?
- In Psalm 150 all instruments are used to praise the Lord, even “clashing cymbals.” Clashing cymbals are loud. So is shouting.
- “Sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalm 149:1) cannot mean “Sing to the Lord only the songs we sang a hundred years ago when they were new songs.”
- Paul writes, in 1 Thessalonians 5:16, “Be joyful always.” This word “joy” is all over the Bible. My wife Linda is a Jew, and I can tell you that Jews know what “joy” means, and remember that Jesus was a Jew. Now listen to this: “joy” is not some intellectual, rational thing, but is an emotion that gets expressed physically and viscerally. If actual Christians really have this thing called “joy” (one of the “fruits of the spirit”), shouldn’t the tops of our church buildings be flying off every Sunday morning because the joy cannot be contained?
- One more thing. And this is a killer for the “serious, respectable Christian.” It’s 2 Samuel 6:14-15: “David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the LORD with all his might, while he and the entire house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouts and the sound of trumpets.” But then Michal, Saul’s daughter, “despised” David for doing this and called him “vulgar.” Then David tells her, “I will celebrate before the LORD. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes.” Please listen to this. David danced. And God called David “a man after his own heart.”
I won’t soon be going to Elder-Beerman to check out the linen ephods, even if they are 60% off the already-reduced sale price. But in Mark 10:13-15 people were bringing little children to Jesus. Jesus’ own disciples rebuked the people for doing this. Then Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”
As Linda and I slowly strolled the streets of Ann Arbor last night in the clean evening air I thought, I know what the Ann Arbor Art Fair really is. It’s just a big bunch of adult creative kids who still get to play and are inviting others to join them. Good for them. It sounds like the heart of God to me.
