Best of Cerulean Sanctum

Choosing Your Canaan

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We’re thinking about putting our son in public school this August.

We homeschooled him via a public e-school this year and personally experienced the Achilles heel of homeschooling: lack of socialization. As an only child in an area where almost all the children go to public school, our son suffered from piecemeal contact with other kids and it showed. Yes, we have him in activities with other kids. It simply hasn’t been enough.

In addition, because he’s an only child, he needs to be in an environment where he’s not the center of attention all the time. Homeschooling works totally against that idea. Nearly every growth area he needs to improve in can best be met by hanging out with a large group of kids for long periods of time.

But when I mentioned this reality to a friend the other day, I received a rather pointed response:

“You’re handing him over to the Canaanites.”

Hmm.

What followed was the usual explanation of how anything but education in an exclusive private Christian school will permanently warp our son. We’ll be totally unable to counteract the brainwashing he’ll receive in public school. Welcome to Canaan!For our decision, we’ll end up with a child who grows up to be one part Bertrand Russell, one part Aleister Crowley, and one part Ted Bundy.

Thank you, NEA.

Or actually, thank you Baptists.

You see, two Baptist megachurches in our rural town control much of the public school district. Folks from their congregations make up a big chunk of the superintendents, principals, and teachers. Considering that these two churches try to outdo each in moral rectitude, I highly doubt first graders will be forced to read Heather Has Two Mommies.

But all this is beside the point.

No, some think the private Christian school education must be superior because it has better people in it. Along the road I live on, many families live in trailers, sectionals, and double-wides. They tend not to send their kids to private Christian schools for no other reason than they can’t pay the tuition.

Truth is, most people making a household income less than $100,000 a year can’t pay to send their children to private Christian schools.

Which leads to the heart of this post:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the LORD your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the LORD your God.
—Leviticus 18:1-4

No matter what we do in the United States of America, we’re forced to choose our Canaan because we aren’t a theocracy like Israel was. As much as the Lord wants us to follow Him exclusively, we Christians aren’t called to bunker ourselves against the rest of the world. We’re called to shine our light amid the darkness. And where is the darkness? Everywhere we look.

And sometimes, it’s oh so disarmingly subtle.

Whatever my child may face in public school, I can assure you that none of it is subtle. On the other hand, the pernicious nature of the subconscious message of the exclusive private Christian school is the the message of upper-middle-class suburban Evangelicalism: materialism.

Fourth-graders putting condoms on bananas OR materialism. Which one damages the soul more? Which is harder to root out? When the Lexus SUVs pull up to drop the kids off at the private Christian school, are the kids aware of their privilege? When they’re all equipped with the latest iPod, the swankest TI graphing calculator, and the non-stop message that it’s all about them, how can they NOT be?

Worse still, how can they possibly see through that gray fog when their own parents can’t?

I’m no master of discernment, but I think I’m fairly capable of dealing with whatever the public school Canaanites can throw at me. The kids I truly worry about are those in the private Christian school who may very well be materialists at the core, yet surrounded by a highly polished veneer of Christianity or—in keeping with an age when truth is now truthiness— what I like to call Christ-iness.

We can’t drop out of Canaan because it’s all around us. We have to choose which Canaan we’ll dwell in. Some do so consciously, while other get sucked in by osmosis.

One of the reasons we moved to the country was to get away from the overt materialism we saw pummeling the suburbs. We want our son to see that not everyone garners merit by what they own. We want him to escape the dependence on others to provide for his every need. We don’t want him in the Canaan that’s so intractable that hardly anyone sees it.

The private Christian school parents forced to send their kid to public school may sit down with him or her and say, “Now be on your guard if they try to tell you that homosexuality and abortion are okay.” Meanwhile, the public school parents sending their child to the private Christian school may say, “Now be on your guard because many people there will define themselves by what they own or what they can buy.”

Choose your Canaan. We all must. No one gets a free pass. Every day each of us must fight evil.

But evil itself is not uniform. It bends the rules. Sometimes it comes as an angel of light and sometimes as a blackened beast from the pit of hell.

It’s the angel of light that troubles me.

Blind, Deaf, and Dumb

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I don’t normally change my plans for posts for the week, but my brother e-mailed me a story yesterday I just couldn’t believe. And I couldn’t believe it on so many levels that I could probably blog about it for the next month and not limn its depths.

As a musician, I enjoy a wide range of music. I think I can appreciate just about any genre of music. Punjabi sitar to punk rock to Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma”—hey, I like it all.

Which is how I know of Joshua Bell.

Sort of the classical music version of Bono, Bell’s the pre-eminent violinist of our times, under-forty, charismatic, and a lady-killer, too. He plays the noted “Gibson ex Huberman” Stradivarius worth $3.5 million. He commands $1,000 a minute performances all over the world.

But the Washington Post wondered what might happen if Bell were asked to dress down and play as a street musician near one of the busy subway connections in DC. An experiment in sociology, so to speak. Famed musicians were asked to weigh in on what might be the outcome. Most predicted problems. The biggest worry? Crowd control.

So Bell, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, took his multi-million dollar Strad down to the Metro to play incognito for morning rush hour. Hidden video camera still of Bell playing in DC subwayHe chose superb violin works unperformable by the less skilled. He played masterfully for the commuters.

And…

The Washington Post has the whole tale (plus hidden camera video) in a fascinating story called “Pearls Before Breakfast.” Please read the whole thing.

Leonard Slatkin, the noted conductor, when asked what he thought might be the outcome, suspected that Bell would draw a large crowd and garner about $150 for his effort. The result proved far less stellar.

In truth, less than a dozen of the 1,097 people who passed by seemed to notice Bell’s presence. Fewer yet paused even momentarily to listen to the finest music in the world played by a virtuoso. Of those who did stop, a couple possessed past experience with the violin, enough to know the guy with his case left open for tips played on a level far beyond what could be expected from a street musician. One woman recognized Bell and stayed around simply because she couldn’t understand what she witnessed. She tossed in a bemused $20, making Bell’s total take for 43 minutes of stellar playing $32.17. And yes, a few folks threw in pennies.

I find it impossible to read that story and not consider that something’s profoundly wrong with us. In our hurtling from one place to another, our lives on perpetual fast -forward (at least until we hit the numbing reality of the cubicle), we’ve allowed the system we live in to rob us of time, relationship, culture, beauty, and every other mark of true humanity that simmers in our God-breathed souls. We act as if wonder itself might be purchased at Target for $9.99 on sale. We get our cheap, adulterated fix, then it’s head down and don’t get in our way.

One vignette within this cautionary tale tells of a mother whose three-year-old kept tugging her away from her objective so he could pause to listen to the guy playing the fiddle. I couldn’t help but think, and a child shall lead them.

Jesus Christ didn’t die simply to secure us a ticket to heaven. He died and rose again that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

In her book The Companions, science fiction author Sheri Tepper imagines a future in which people wear veil-like clothing in public in order to preserve their own cocoon of privacy. In many ways, I fear that Tepper’s world is already our own. What else can explain the silent shrouds we wear that cut us off from others, that speak to a child and tell him not to want to listen to the beautiful music, or to interact with the man playing it. That shroud descends over all of life, smothering it.

When I hear people telling me they prefer attending their local megachurch because it affords them some anonymity, I wonder when Jesus gave His divine imprimatur to our privacy. Yet we guard ourselves to the point of losing our souls. We numb our hearts to life going on around us. Wrapped in our cocoons, we literally fail to stop and smell the roses—or listen to Joshua Bell playing a Bach piece that once summoned tears to even the driest eyes.

Are we that beaten-down? That blind, deaf, and dumb?

It comes as no shock to me that much of Jesus’ ministry dealt with healing the blind, deaf, and dumb. We understand the physical component, but do we understand the spiritual and emotional portion of our marred humanity that compels us to walk by the world’s greatest violinist and not even pause for one moment to revel in his skill? To drop out of the ever-rushing torrent to soar on music crafted by the greats? Bach wrote “To the glory of God” on every work he penned, yet that glory wafts past us and we perceive it not.

How can it be that we have fallen so far, even those of us who claim to be Christians?

The Holy Who?

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How can it be that in a charismatic generation we’ve forgotten the Holy Spirit?
—Leonard Ravenhill

Love Ravenhill. No one cut to the chase better than he did. That’s the kind of thinking I pray gets exhibited on Cerulean Sanctum daily.

I wrote on the Holy Spirit last Thursday, but driving home from church today I got overwhelmed with a similar message, so I’d like to go into more detail.

Many people already know that I claim to be a charismatic, though I dislike the term immensely, and hate much of what the charismatic movement has transmogrified into in recent years. You can’t be around charismatics very long and not run into some—for want of a better phrase—serious wackos. Loyal readers will know that I routinely hold the spiritual feet of the charismatic movement to the fire. I simply possess no tolerance for charismania, as I call it.

On the other hand, this post addresses the other side of the issue.

A few questions:

1. Why is it that you can surf a hundred Christian blogs and not find a single mention of the Holy Spirit?

2. How is it possible that you can go to your average Christian bookstore and buy a dozen Christian books and find virtually no mention of the Holy Spirit?

3. Why is it that the institutional churches have either turned the Holy Spirit into a “fairy godmother” or gutted His power to do anything more than help us remember a few Bible verses?

4. In fact, how is it that some Christians routinely allow the Bible to replace the Holy Spirit in the Trinity?

5. How can it be that we can talk about eschatology, soteriology, epistemology, and a hundred other Christian -ologies, but someone casually asks to define pneumatology and entire swaths of mature Christians will scratch their heads?

How are any of these possible?

The inescapable truth is that every aspect of Church that we practice today existed before the Holy Spirit was given, yet we had no Church! The Church exists for one reason only, and that’s the Lord placed His Spirit inside us! Tiffany window - The Holy SpiritCommunity existed, religious practice existed, love existed, service existed, even the Scriptures existed, but the Holy Spirit did not make his dwelling place in human beings.

Folks, the mark of the Church must always be the Holy Spirit in us. Everything else can be copied by other religions. But they do not have the Holy Spirit. He’s the promise. He’s the seal. He’s the power!

How then can we talk about everything else BUT Him?

One of the most compelling reasons for the Western Church’s comatose state can be found in our non-existent pneumatology. We’ve reduced the Holy Spirit to some index cards with a few memorized Scriptures on them. We’ve taken the Holy Spirit and accepted His seal on us for salvation, but then we move on as if He’s done with us.

Consider this well-known verse:

…Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.
—Zechariah 4:6b

We’ll quote that till we’re blue in the face and then go right out and minister from the flesh.

I’m not a supporter of the Emerging Church, but I’m sympathetic to some of the reforms they’re calling for in the Church as a whole. Yet I’m utterly mystified that a reform movement could be so lacking in any concept of the Holy Spirit. Pneumatology in the Emerging Church? I’ve not heard one peep about it. As far as I’m concerned, any reform movement that perpetually leaves out the mention of the Holy Spirit is nothing but flesh-centered hogwash.

And you, the institutional church guys. Stop laughing, because you’re the ones who forgot what the Holy Spirit is all about. No wonder your spiritual offspring in the Emerging Church are clueless about the Holy Spirit. You gave them nothing to work with. You’re the one’s who shoved the Holy Spirit in a closet and forgot about Him!

Yeah, I’m a little peeved about this. I hear a lot of pointless talk on the Web about revival and how to rouse the sleeping Western Church, yet almost nothing about the Holy Spirit. I promise this: if we start preaching on the necessity of the Spirit to empower our lives to holiness, evangelism, and true manifestations of the Spirit’s power to a generation unimpressed with talk without walk, we’ll see revival.

Ask yourselves how the Church grew from a couple hundred disciples at Pentecost to around 20-25 million adherents by the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Most people couldn’t read, no NT canon existed, the Gentiles had passing references to the Scriptures, persecution of Christians flourished, Christians didn’t meet in megachurches, and yet Christianity flourished. How?

Not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit!

How is that we’ve forgotten this? Worse, how is it that we’ve forgotten the Third Person of the Trinity altogether?