Too Much Not to Share

Justo Gonzalez in his book Manana states: “Spirituality is first of all living in the gospel-making faith the foundation for life. And it is also living out the gospel-making faith the foundation of actions and structure…The early church is spiritual not because it spends all its time in prayer and meditation but because it is a church seeking to live out of the future that the Spirit makes present…It is future oriented. It is life lived out of an expectation, out of hope and a goal. And that goal is the coming Reign of God. To have the Spirit is to have a foot up on the stirrup of the eschatological future and to live now as those who expect a new reality, the coming of the Reign of God.”

The Methodists I have met on two visits to Cuba amazed me by their depth of spirituality, where their actions reflected that they are living in the future Kingdom of God. Their actions do not make sense in the present day of Castro’s Cuba nor do they make sense in the current day reality of the United States. However, they do make sense in the context that with Christ the Kingdom of God has come. Even though this Kingdom has not come in full glory, we are now participants with Christ in the building of God’s kingdom through the Holy Spirit.

In Cuba, I met a young missionary named Edward. Edward bicycles 37 kilometers twice a week to a village in order to share the gospel. Edward shared his testimony with us. He had been an angry teenager, who felt he had no future in Castro’s Cuba, so he turned to alcohol and women for comfort. This made sense to Edward in the reality of present day Cuba, where people struggle for a limited piece of the future. Then, Christ touched his heart and he was born again into a new being. This new being was able to shed the old and begin to live in the reality of not Castro’s Cuba but the reality of God’s kingdom. His bicycling 37 kilometers did not make him spiritual, instead his living in the reality of God’s kingdom where this effort makes sense is the key to Edward’s spirituality. Edward’s actions are consistent with his beliefs. Another missionary, a woman, was a nurse. Although not a highly paid position in Cuba, it is still a good career. However, this nurse gave up her career to become a missionary. She now lives in a small house in a
very poor neighborhood. She uses her house for a church. Her actions only make sense when they are viewed as part of the building of God’s future kingdom in the present.

Gonzalez writes, “So long as we proclaim the Reign but make little effort to speak even a few words of ‘Reignese’ our witness will hardly be credible. If, by the power of the Holy
Spirit, we are a pilgrim people looking forward to the coming Reign of God, we had better begin practicing the love of that Reign – we had better begin organizing our lives according to the new order that we know is coming and that we proclaim.”
The Cuban Methodists are spiritual because they have organized their lives according to the new order. What may be considered a great sacrifice in our reality takes on new meaning in the Kingdom. Luke in Acts 4:31-35 states: “After this prayer, the building where they were meeting shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. And they preached God’s message with boldness. All the believers were of one heart and mind, and they felt that what they owned was not their own; they shared everything they had. And the apostles gave powerful witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God’s great favor was upon them all. There was no poverty among them, because people who owned land and houses sold them and brought the money to the apostles for those in need.”

But why would those who received the Holy Spirit, sell everything? Does this make sense in our reality? Not in present day Cuba or the United States, but it does in the reality of the Kingdom of God. The Cuban Methodists never bragged about their work to us. They honestly and forthrightly told us of their work. To them, what they were doing made sense. They shared all they had with others, as if they had more than an abundance of goods. In many of the villages that we visited, converts opened their homes so that the gospel could be shared in their village. These homes were often very small, but the little space they had they shared with others. Where I saw too little to share, they saw too much not to share.

There was nothing sacrificial aboutworking or sharing. Their actions reflected that the future has arrived in the present, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jurgen Moltmann writes in The Source of Life, “There is enough for everyone! That is the incredible message of the story. We are not being told some historical tale about the golden age of the first Christians long ago. This is the disclosure of real, possible ways of living for us today. We can have this experience ourselves. The experience of the community of the Holy Spirit.”

Spirituality has nothing to do with how much we pray or fast or worship. Spirituality has everything to do with the Spirit, who empowers us to live out a life that is consistent with the message that with Christ, God’s future kingdom has come to the present. The faith of the Cuban Methodists is spiritual but it is also orthopathic in nature. We are all familiar with orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice). In fact in the United States we probably excel at these. However, Wesley also talked about orthopathy (right feelings/experience) as part of our faith response.

Theodore Runyon, in his book, The New Creation, comments on Wesley’s theology, “Creation is to be restored and perfected. God is the God who declares, ‘Behold I make all things new.’ The transformation of human lives is the foretaste of that which is to come. He is already renewing the face of the earth. Our justification, regeneration and sanctification link us therefore to this divine work of cosmic transformation…In orthopathic faith our experience is incorporated into the unfolding history of salvation and we are given a goal and direction that includes both personal renewal and a participation in the first fruits of the kingdom.”

With the goal and direction that comes from their orthopathic faith, Cuban Methodists claim the power of their new lives in Christ. “So you should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like God’s very own children, adopted into his family-calling him ‘Father, dear Father.’ For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God’s children.” ( Romans 8:15-16).

There is a boldness in the Cuban Methodist preaching, in their singing, in their praying and in their witnessing. When Omar witnessed to a non-believer in the village of San Pablo and asked him if he wanted to accept Christ in his life, there was boldness. When we prayed for healing for a mentally ill man in the Amigo Ven a Cristo house church there was no timidity. When Ernesto, Danilo or Victor preached with conviction and power, it was not a pastoral power, but a power that comes from God. All of us in Cuba were claiming our authority in God, through the Holy Spirit. What we experienced was not only the potential but the reality of the new creation. The Cubans are not going to settle for heaven when they die, they are claiming it for themselves now and in the present.

Orthopathic faith, however, must also incorporate orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Runyon building on Wesley comments, “Orthopathic faith is thus the kind of faith relationship that is open to reason and willing to be corrected and reshaped in its self-understanding by normative experience and the counsel of the community of faith.”

The Cuban Methodist church has had to struggle with this issue as it reshaped itself during the Castro years. Many Cubans either have grown up with no religious background or in the Santeria faith. If just left to experience their new faith in Christ, Cuban Christianity might have strayed into a synchretic form of religion. However, the Cuban Methodist church has been able to answer this challenge by structuring the church and its practices after the primitive church and John Wesley’s subsequent model.