For the joy set before him: Report on our September 2024 trip to Cuba

Ken Sehested & Nancy Hastings Sehested
13 October 2024, joint sermon at Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville NC

Part one: Ken begins

The text for today is a selection of verses from Hebrews 11 and 12.

The opening verse is a familiar one: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

The author then goes on to record a long list of those who have been faithful, who have trusted God. He admits in the middle of this long list that “time would fail me” to tell all the stories.

Then, chapter 12 begins: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith . . . who for the sake of the joy set before him endured the cross. . .”

The sequence in this text is essential: “for the sake of joy . . . endured the cross.” Endured not from sheer willpower, nor from superhuman strength, or out of moral heroism—but for joy.

Nancy and I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Cuba, and we’ve been asked to report some of our learning. First off, let me mention how the invitation came about. Nancy will then tell some stories reflecting on what we learned. Then I’ll close with some commentary on why this emerging partnership with Oliva Baptist is important in our ongoing journey as people of faith.

The invitation we received came from Rev. Idael Montero, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Havana. That congregation’s beloved pastor emeritus, Rev. Raul Suarez, celebrated his 89th birthday this summer; and the congregation wanted to do a celebration of life for him as he entered his 90th year. They were also celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Fraternity of Baptist Churches’ founding, begun after 3 congregations were expelled from the Western Baptist Convention in Cuba.

I first met Raul in 1985 in a very providential encounter with him on one of his trips to the US. We talked for well over an hour, and at several points he quoted from memory long passages from the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That initial conversation then began to initiate additional contacts between the Baptist Peace Fellowship and Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba.

I had no idea that King’s legacy was known in Cuba. In fact, I don’t think I knew there were Baptists in Cuba. Still today some people in the US believe the church was outlawed in Cuba.

Nancy preached in that special, standing-room-only service on 8 September, and I offered the benediction. Then I was on a panel discussion in the afternoon to share stories of our encounters with Raul, who also founded the Martin Luther King Center next door to the church. (In fact, a delegation from the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta were among the special guests in the service.)

This trip provided the opportunity to spend parts of two days with the pastor and congregation of Juan Naranjo Baptist Church in the little village of Oliva, as well as visits with other Fraternity pastors and congregations in that region.

It’s really hard to summarize our experiences over 10 days. The closest, brief sentence I’ve managed is this: We were with inspirited people in a dispirited land living under the mean-spirited and draconian embargo by the United States over the past seven decades.

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Part two: Cuba and WNC after Storm Helene
A Reflection by Nancy Hastings Sehested

In Celtic spirituality a sacred place where the boundaries between heaven and earth are blurred is called a “thin place.”

A thin place finds us in a doorway, an opening to new ways of seeing. It is a holy encounter…where beauty and meaning can emerge. Haven’t we discovered that heaven and hell can be  found in the very same place on this earth?

Cuba is a thin place.

Since storm Helene, Western North Carolina is a thin place.

Someone asked me if Cuba’s disasters with limited water, food, and electrical power is like what’s happening here.

Yes… in the sense that we have experienced hardships and there is suffering.

Yes… in the sense that there is loss of lives, livelihoods, homes, and roads.

Yes…in the sense that neighbors are helping neighbors.

But no. It is not like Cuba.

There is no National Guard, FEMA, disaster relief aid, utility crews, construction crews, maintenance crews, food and water supplies, gasoline tankers, water maintenance crews, medical personnel, or federal, state and local agencies offering needed help.

I offer a few glimpses of the thin places of sacred experiences on our trip.

On our first day in Havana, several members of Ebenezer Baptist Church—four adults and two teenagers—sat down with us to offer their experiences of living in Cuba now.

One man is a physician, and now serves on the pastoral staff of the church. This is what he said:

“We love our country. We remember how proud we were that everyone had an education and healthcare and food and shelter.

We still love our country, but now it’s heartbreaking. For professionals like me who are doctors and nurses and teachers, it’s an inverted pyramid. I can make more money selling crackers on the street corner than being a doctor.

“At our church, the people line up each week to receive care, for food and for medicine. We offer what we can. It is not enough.

And we are always grieving the loss of family members or young people who have left their homeland to find a way to live in other countries where there is less hard-ship. Who can blame them?”

On Sunday we took a photo of the eight teens in the youth group in front of a picture of Gandhi that hung on the wall. Our own Dan Snyder sent that picture. Then the teens asked us: “Would you pray for us? Would you offer a prayer for us to stay strong on the path of peace and non-violence, the way of Gandhi, King, and Jesus?”

We formed a circle and prayed.

On Monday we went about an hour outside Havana to a church pastored by the president of the Fraternity of Churches. The church house was filled and a full worship service happened. Pastor Corita invited members to offer why they are part of the church.

Answers: Because we find hope and love here. Because we can help children in this neighborhood here. Because we can share the love of Jesus together through this church.

For the benediction, everyone stood and faced the doorway. They placed one hand over their heart and one hand reaching out toward the door. Then the pastor prayed that they would be the love of God for their neighborhood.

A thin place.

Midweek we went to the town of Matanzas. We stayed at the seminary. We saw Ophelia, a retired professor and a former president of the seminary, now in her 80’s. She said: “I’ve never seen hunger in Cuba until now. Never.”

And after some articulate commentary on the horrors of the embargo, as well as the additional sanctions against Cuba inflicted during the Trump administration, she said:

“Thank you for coming to visit. We need people to visit us in this difficult time. We need people to walk alongside us. We need to know that we are not alone.”

As I stood in front of the chapel waiting for the morning prayers, I saw below me a large vegetable garden. I waved to the gardener. Then he picked a tiny flower blossom, walked up the incline and handed it to me.

Thin places.

On Saturday we visited the church in Oliva.  About 20 adults and 10 children were all out front to welcome us with hugs and smiles. Then we sat in a circle and looked to see each and every one wearing around their neck the pottery pendants of a cross that Teresa [a Circle of Mercy member] made for them.

Pastor Waldemar welcomed us with prayers. The children sang songs and offered poems and bible verses and gave us pictures they had drawn.  Waldemar led us in a Bible study from the passage in Acts which contains the line “silver and gold have I none but what I have I give you.”

The passage was acted out with some of the adults playing the roles, complete with some scarves for costumes.

Waldemar then divided us into two groups to discuss the passage. One group was all women. When they returned to the circle they said this about their understanding of the passage:

“There are women in our neighborhood who are being abused. We don’t have silver and gold to offer, but we can give them a pathway to hope. We can make sure they know that God does not want anyone to be assaulted.”

Pastor Waldemar added: “No one should ever live with emotional or physical abuse. We have another story that they can live. God wants everyone to live safe and free from violence in any form. We can offer them healing from trauma. And we can help more men to learn something different than the machismo mindset.”

The next day on Sunday was an incredible worship service: lively music, beautiful testimonies, children offering interpretive movement to songs, and a hope-filled sermon by Ken. The service ended with communion. Then the communion continued with a lunch for all of spaghetti and tomato sauce.

A thin place—in God’s own presence—in the beauty of the people clearly evident in their generosity, their faith and hope…and joy! Yes, joy!

A final remembrance: The artistic community in Cuba is alive and well. Art and music are everywhere. Beauty is as essential as bread.

Body and soul must be fed. Cubans know this well.

There was no place we visited, whether around a dinner table or in a church house, where music was not offered. They sing their way to assurance, to hope. They sing their gratitude for the Presence of God in the midst of the storms.

And some of those leading as well as joining the people in offering food for body and soul are our own members, Kim and Stan. I don’t think I have to say this to you. You already know that they are extraordinary. They love the people. The people love them. They live in the midst of the struggles and they offer their remarkable loving selves.

And yet, no es facil (“it’s not easy,” a common Cuban refrain). It is not easy. Stan and Kim have faithfully shared their sorrows as well as their joys with us.

As we were dropped off at the airport, Kim had a request for prayer:

Pray that I can keep touching the rock of God’s refuge and strength.

And so we pray, and we pray with our bodies and souls, reaching to touch another day of being in the thin place, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, laying aside every weight to run with perseverance the path set before us, always looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, disregarding the shame and is seated on the right hand of the Merciful One.

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Part three: Ken concludes

As we continue our partnership with Naranjo Baptist Church in Oliva, we need to reflect on the theological significance of this relationship.

Why do this? What makes this connection important? What does it say about the nature of our congregation, a tangible indicator or practice that coheres with our beliefs and convictions? The separate but deeply related questions of “who are we?” and “what are we to do?” must be pondered and clarified.

Our congregation has a long history of mission engagements. The very first mission grant we made together—and this was before we even had a budget—was a [2002] gift to Rabbis For Human Rights to replant olive trees destroyed by the Israeli Defense Force in the West Bank.

As with the author of Hebrews, “time would fail me” to tell all the stories of how we’ve engaged the broken places in our community and the larger world. To name but a few more recent activities: pastoral support for inmates at the women’s prison; Raw Tools’ gun turn in; advocacy for immigrants; very public support for the LGBTQ community; opposition to militarism and environmental degradation, including multiple acts of civil disobedience; opposition to the corporate takeover of our health care institutions. We could easily spend an hour simply naming the concrete actions we’ve taken supporting the creation of a Beloved Community, together and separately.

Why do we do these things? Is it because we are unusually kind-hearted? Is it because we believe it’s better to give than to receive? Is it because we tend to vote for Democrats? Or maybe we’re just doing what our Mamas advised us to do?

All of these things are true, but none are true enough. There’s something deeper going on in our hearts and minds, and our hands and feet. Most importantly, this is what we are doing: We are being saved—yes, saved—being saved from a culture that says only the strong survive; that the rich take what they can and the poor endure what the must; that lasting power flows through the barrel of a gun; that the reality of scarcity demands that we get what we want, regardless of what we have to do to get it.

Whenever we position ourselves in compassionate proximity with those our economy and culture deems expendable—with the bruised and battered and broken and vulnerable—we are putting ourselves into position to more clearly hear what the Spirit is saying. And what the Spirit is saying is that joy is the heartbeat of what God intended in Creation and promises to bring to fruition in the new heaven and the new earth.

In my sermon in Oliva, I concluded: “Our desire in forming a partnership is we want to learn about your joy. We do not come wanting to evangelize you—we want to be evangelized by you. We believe that Christians in Cuba are among our ‘great cloud of witnesses’ from whom we need to learn.”

In our serving we are saved. And in our saving we are empowered to engage in countering (however modestly or dramatically) the rule of vengeance. In that action we discover joy, the kind of joy that is beyond happiness—joy that sustains through the darkest hour. Joy that generates and sustains endurance; joy that knows the world is headed for reclamation; joy that brings us into the company of Jesus.

May it be so.

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Addendum. It was our honor to travel to Cuba with Stan Hastey, former director of the Alliance of Baptists, which has fostered partnerships of congregations here with those affiliated with the Fraternity of Baptist Churches in Cuba. This was Stan’s 35th trip to Cuba. Everywhere we went, when meeting new friends in Cuba, the fact that we are friends of Stan made us all the more welcomed.

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Nancy Hastings Sehested (left), Rev. Raul Suárez, & Ken Sehested, at a “celebration of life” service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Havana, Cuba