So, before we begin, let’s talk about what we are doing and what we are not doing today. I have competing interests that need a bit of satisfying. Most of you probably came to church today expecting the Beatitudes, since it is the 6th Sunday after the Epiphany. Those who pay that close attention to the rhythms of our worship life were no doubt confused to see the Collect of the Day, where we admit our weakness to God and our desire to follow all His teachings, but the wrong readings. This was intentional, and I will explain in a moment. Our seminarian will have different concerns, though. On the holy mountain we call Sewanee, he is learning that minor feasts NEVER trump the Lord’s Feast Days, right? And Casey is also learning there is sometimes a conflict between pastoral application and theological understanding. Right? So, I had an issue this week. How do I remind us all of the Feast of Bishop Charles Todd Quintard, sum up the unexpected sermon series that has focused on our charisms and our evaluation of their use and success, and not set a bad example for Casey? To be clear, we are celebrating the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, but I used the rector’s prerogative to use other readings from Scripture. It just so happens I selected the readings that are appointed for our church’s observation of Quintard’s feast day. In other words, if I prayerfully discerned correctly, y’all will get the preaching and teaching you need, and Casey will not be misled! More likely, I know, some of you are wondering who is this Quintard dude, and why does the priest think we need to talk about him? I’ll explain that in a few minutes, too!
Our Gospel lesson I chose today leaps
ahead to chapter 14 of Luke. Jesus is at
the dinner where He famously watches how people seat themselves at the dinner
and then teaches on it. Jesus encourages
those who truly love God to sit at the seats of least honor, promising that
those who are exalted will be humbled and that those who are humble will be
exalted. Jesus goes on to encourage His
dinner party to invite those who can repay by means of invitations of their own
to these kinds of dinner parties. In
response to Jesus’ teachings, one of the men at the party declares that anyone
who eats bread in the kingdom of God will be blessed. It sounds a bit innocent to our ears, but it
reflects one of the teachings regarding Messiah and a warped sense of no
obligation.
I have explained enough that you may be
sick of hearing it, but one of the threads of teaching surrounding Messiah was
that He would be God’s steward on earth.
Messiah would be like David and Solomon, but far more grand. As good as life was under those to messiahs,
other small “a” anointed men of God, the Messiah would establish a long reign
of peace and prosperity. Enemies would
be put down. Persecution would be put
down. Israel would be glorified by the
nations because of God’s obvious provision.
The sad part of this understanding was
that it assumed that one lived a lottery life.
What I mean by that is, if one was not alive when Messiah came, one
missed out on all the blessings of His reign and rule. In that case, the best that one could hope
for was the knowledge that one’s descendants would participate in Messiah’s
reign. Now, please understand, I am
oversimplifying some of this. I want you
to understand one reason why faithful Jews did not understand Jesus and did not
see Him as the Messiah of God. I also
want to simplify your understanding so you can see why this dinner guest’s
proclamation is, at best a cop out on his responsibilities as a son of Abraham,
or, at worst, a societal/socio-economic belief that the poor get what they
deserve in this life.
Jesus responds to the declaration of this
other gift with yet another famous parable. We are two years into a pandemic and do not do
dinner parties like we used to in the old days, so I struggled with a modern
example. Today is Super Bowl Sunday, and
I understand that, perhaps the most famous Tennessean ever, Dolly Parton, will
be in a couple commercials this evening during the game. So, imagine Dolly Parton invited you to her
Super Bowl Party today. I won’t ask for
a show of hands, but if her party started during church, how many of you would
be skipping church for that party? Lucky
for all y’all, we have confession and absolution in a few minutes, huh?
I get it.
We’d all go. Those who felt
really guilty might even ask me if we could do church at her party. As hostess, Dolly is planning quite the
event. There has to be enough food and
drink. People need to be seated at
places in order to foment conversations.
There needs to be enough televisions.
And there needs to be diversions for those who do not like football but
love parties. Maybe she has a room with
the puppy or kitten bowl on in there.
And maybe, because it is a pandemic and we think better of these things,
she makes the party available online to those for whom a gathering would be a
bit too dangerous. Think of all the
planning she has to do if just the 80 of us at the two services agree to show
up. Now, imagine the big day arrives,
and we start giving Dolly lame excuses.
How mad and disappointed do you think she would be? If we were hosting a smaller dinner party,
how disappointed would we be? We all
understand emergencies, but these excuses are the very opposite of
emergencies. The host rightly interprets
the rejections as being blown off. He
went to all the planning and expenses, and nobody can be bothered to come,
after all of them first accepted his invitation.
So,
the man sends his slave into the lanes and streets of the town and instructs
him to bring in the undesirables of life in civilization. “Bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind,
and the lame.” The slave is obedient and
does as he is instructed, but the dinner party was huge. Even with all those undesirables present,
there is space for more. So the host
sends the slave to go to the roads and lanes and compel people to come in to
fill his house. Then comes the horrible
pronouncement: “For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my
dinner.”
We can certainly understand the host’s
anger, can we not? If you have ever gone
to the work of hosting a party and had people forget or blow you off, you may
know this anger even better. The problem
for those whom Jesus is addressing is that they are treating God the very same
way those invited to the feast in Jesus’ parable are treating the host. At best, the man who makes the pronouncement
is blind to God’s teaching on how faithful Jews are called to treat their
fellow sons and daughters of Abraham. At
worst, he is kicking the can down the road and saying, in effect, “well, at
least those undesirables who eat bread in the kingdom of God will be blessed.” Jesus, who is invited to this party because
He is a famous Teacher and a worker of signs, is being ignored, much like His
Father in heaven.
All that, of course, leads me back to both
our own struggles with our responses to God’s gifts in our lives and His
invitation and, just as importantly, our recognition of His heart and His
desire that we invite everyone to His feast on His behalf. It’s a lot, isn’t it? I mean, if the wrong people start accepting
His invitation, we might be perceived as one of them! And what if, heaven forbid, they start coming
to our church and our party? What will
the neighbors think?
Thankfully, we Adventers have a wonderful
manifestation of Christ’s love for the world in our midst. At the beginning of this, I reminded us all
that we celebrate the Feast of Charles Todd Quintard this Wednesday. Quintard is famous in the liturgical church world
for a number of reasons, but he is famous around here because he was the second
rector of this parish. He inherited a
parish that had jettisoned pew rents because its members thought such rents
excluded the poor. If you have ever been
mad about stewardship, you have your spiritual forebears at Advent to
blame. Before we and a couple of other
churches burst on the scene in the early to mid-1800’s, churches rented pews to
families to figure out their budgets.
The problem, of course, was that if you could not afford a pew, or all
the pews were rented, you could not sit on a pew during the service. Now you know why pew boxes look eerily
similar to box seats at old baseball stadiums.
For my part, I sometimes wish we could go back to that system. Can you imagine what I could charge for those
pews in the back rows today?
We laugh, but our reputation was already that
we were a congregation that allowed “those people” to sit among them. We were willing to go into the lanes and
streets and invite those who normally would not be invited. We added to that reputation by becoming the
first parish to let our slaves join us in worship. Again, just to remind us of the context, they
lived in Nashville. . . in the
1850’s. Civil War was brewing. Livelihoods were threatened. And we crazy Adventers, led by then Rector
Quintard and our Vestry, voted to let our slaves come to church with us. To be clear, we are not talking about full
integration in any sense of the word.
The slaves were expected to sit off by themselves among the other
slaves. And we declined to allow the
slaves of slave owners who were not members to attend our church and sit with
our slaves. But, in the middle of 1850’s
Nashville, there was a church that had blacks and whites worshipping
together. Imagine that scandal! Now we were a church that allowed poor people
and slaves to come worship God with us!
Talk about living the Gospel lesson we read today!
Our reputation was that we were “Yankee
Sympathizers,” lead by our known “Yankee Sympathizer,” Charles Todd
Quintard. Such was his reputation, and
ours, that he was rejected by the 1st Regiment when he applied to be
surgeon and chaplain. Just to remind
those of us who know his story, Quintard was a medical doctor before he met
Bishop Otey, who convinced him he was called by God to be a priest. Quintard began serving a group of what you
and I would call irregulars or mercenaries.
I thought of Mary-Clyde this week as I read that detail for the first
time, they were called something like the Rock-City Warriors, so I laughed
about the Rockhounds who meet here monthly.
That group was eventually merged into the 1st Regiment, and
they led the charge that Quintard still be their doctor and pastor. Eventually, despite the mistrust of the
officers, Quintard was given a commission serving as both surgeon and chaplain
of the 1st Regiment. The rest
is, as they say, history, but is a history worthy of several human beings
rather than just one.
After serving the 1st Regiment,
and POW’s, faithfully. Then rector
Quintard was elected the second bishop of Tennessee. In part, because of his work with POW’s, northern
bishops came to his consecration. It was
a momentous occasion for the country.
For the first and only time, the Episcopal Church appeared on page 3 of
the New York Times. The authors wrote
that if the Episcopal Church, which had been seemingly torn asunder by the
advent of war, could reconcile and come back together, maybe, just maybe, there
was hope that our country could do the same.
Imagine, New York Times authors hoping the church, our church, could
lead the country toward reconciliation and finding hope in our own!
One of then Quintard’s ministries was
appointed by the House of Bishops. He
was tasked with the effort to stem the flow of freed slaves into what would
become the American Methodist-Episcopal Church.
Quintard’s reputation as a known “Yankee Sympathizer,” made him the man
to lead that effort on behalf of our church in the South. He began the process of planting what would
become, and still are, cardinal black churches in Georgia, Mississippi, and
Alabama. In his discussions with those
men (sorry, ladies, we did not ordain women in those days), he realized it was
the very opposite of pastoral to force freed salves to train for ministry with
the sons of their former masters.
Although these men were of great faith and full of forgiveness, and
eventually ordained to the priesthood, forgetting was another matter. So, Bishop Quintard commissioned the creation
of the first seminary for freed slaves and their descendants on what we think
of as the Fisk University campus. Was it
ideal? No, Quintard lamented that in his
writings. Was it segregation? Not in the sense our 21st century
ears hear the word. The freed slaves had
to have an experience apart from their former masters and their sons. Quintard likened it to God’s work with Israel
during the Exodus. And it was his hope
and expectation that, one day, those called to ordained ministry would be
gathered back into one seminary flock, where the students would, as they always
have, been drawn into true fellowship and collegiality by the Lord Jesus
Christ.
I see some expression of wow. I intended to end with this part of Quintard’s
life, but I think we could all do with a quick, but fuller, reminder. Although all of that was enough in that day
and age for us to consider Quintard a saint, it was not nearly the end of his
work. In his spare time, Quintard became
vice-Chancellor of Sewanee and began the rebuilding process required after its
destruction during the war. Adventers
provided the seed money for what would become the vice-Chancellor/bishopric on
top of the Holy Mountain.
Once his task on top of the mountain was
completed, Quintard moved the bishopric to Memphis. He invited a convent of nuns to move into his
former residence. You and I know those
faithful ladies as “Constance and her Companions.” In truth, many more Companions of Constance
than her fellow sisters died in answer to Quintard’s requests. When Yellow Fever broke out in Memphis, a
former medical doctor turned overseer of the church was in residence. We live in a pandemic and so likely
understand all the anxieties that the people in Memphis felt during their
plague far better now than we did three years ago. But, Bishop Quintard mustered the church to
minister to the community of Memphis.
Former Yankee soldiers, who knew Quintard from the war, answered his
call for help and provided essential sacramental services, even though it cost
some their lives. Constance and her
fellow sisters answered the call, though it cost most of them their lives. Other Christians, whose names and work are
known to God alone, answered the call.
Some responded by writing checks to support the work being done
especially for the newly orphaned and newly widowed. Others fervently prayed that God would
protect His servants and ensure they glorified Him in their work and ministry. And now you are reminded, or have learned for
the first time, why we remember Bishop Quintard each February 16.
We have been speaking for some weeks about
the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and their exercise to the glory of God. Adventers have wrestled with the Scriptures
and with me over things like whether they even have them, whether their use has
been faithful enough based on the results, and whether they really are one of
those benefits of His passion, as we remind ourselves in one of our weekly
Eucharistic prayers. We have even wrestled
a bit about whether we really are called to fight insurmountable evils in our
communities or lives, knowing that we will likely fail “to make a meaningful
difference” or “meaningful change.” We
have been having this conversation and teaching and wrestling in the midst of
the season after the Epiphany, when we intentional remind ourselves that God
manifested His grace in love in the face of Christ Jesus, our Lord and Savior,
and that He promises to continue to manifest that same grace in us for the
benefit of those around us.
For us, we have an amazing example! Each and every one of you who attend this church
regularly know the challenges and rewards and everything associated with being
an Adventer. You ruefully laughed when
we joked about the Vestry making good and bad decisions because you have been
on Vestries that did the same thing. You
struggled between guffawing and getting rid of that spiritual wedgie when I
remarked that the word “slave” could easily be replaced with “teenager” and
capture the sentiments of the arguments in favor and in opposition to allowing
them to worship. Some of you cringed at
the idea of trying to live in Nashville in the 1850’s and being known as, or a
close associate of, “Yankee Sympathizers.”
You know these things because you are the inheritors of those decisions. It is, to speak loosely, in all our spiritual
DNA’s. We understand that our Father
calls all human beings to the Wedding Feast, and we ruefully understand that
faithful witness to His calling on our lives means the world will not always
esteem us or even respect us. Yet we
also understand that we are called to be obedient to the One who created us and
called us to be His children, the same One who called us and empowered us to
love others into His kingdom, especially those whom the world will not love.
Unlike other parishes, though, you and I
know the people who preceded us in this parish.
They were just like us. They had
glorious successes and terrible failures, but look what happened when they let
God lead them in their lives! If you
read the excerpts of Quintard and our parish in A Cloud of Witnesses, or
Lesser Feasts and Fasts, or Holy Women, Holy Men, you would think the
Church esteems Quintard and Adventers for their work to rebuild Sewanee because
of their commitment to an Episcopal education.
I mean, it was a good work. Our
spiritual ancestors at Advent made it possible.
But that is the wrong focus for our church and for ourselves. I have only shared the barest summary today regarding
their work. Those of you in Bible
studies and other groups know there is so much more to the stories.
In the end, Quintard’s life, and the lives
of those Adventers and others for whom he shepherded, taught, and cared, are
determined not by their competence or excellence or supernatural morality. The measure of their lives was determined by
God, who blessed their faithful obedience in ways that exceeded anything they
could have asked or accomplished on their own.
And those choices and God’s blessing served not only as a light in the
mid -1800’s, but even to us. You see,
like that song we should always sing on All Saints’ Day, where we sing to God
that we want to be one too, we know that God can take a normal Adventer and
create an example for righteous living in the darkest of times. That is not to say that our forebears were
holy and perfect--far from it! But they
trusted that the One who was perfect, the One who loved them to His death, was
the One who would see to it that they had everything they needed to glorify Him
in their midst. If He can do that for an
Adventer then, we know He can do it for us!
If He was faithful in His promises to our spiritual ancestors, we know
we can trust Him to be faithful to His promises to us!
I would end the sermon there, as it is a
great place to stop, but I remind us all of these stories today for a couple
other purposes besides encouraging us.
Those of you who work with others who attend other Episcopal parishes
may find yourself in the midst of passionate discussions over whether what
Quintard did was worthy of inclusion in our canon of Episcopal saints. If all we measured was his work at Sewanee,
there is far less to defend him. In a
time where we are considering the appropriateness of certain saints, let us
encourage folks to consider the contexts and all the accomplishments. Should Adventers have allowed other slaves to
worship with them? Should they have intermingled
with the slaves that came to worship? Of
course. But place yourself in that time
in that place, and look at the outcome of their decisions. Do you think they or Quintard expected the
work after the Civil War? Do you think
those Adventers in 1850 could have ever imagined their first steps would lead
to a seminary to form freed slaves and their descendants for the priesthood in
our Church? Like all the saints in the
Scriptures and in the wider canon, they were flawed human beings. They were grasping at those things they saw
dimly, but that they saw so much better than those around them in
Nashville. When they failed, like us,
they repented, and asked God to guide them, lead them, and empower them. In return, God asked for their faithful
obedience, for them to go into the streets and lanes of Nashville and invite
those they found to His feast, and they obeyed.
That faithful obedience cost them.
It was cross-bearing in ways you and I cannot understand with 21st
century eyes and hearts, but it was faithful.
And their faithful obedience blessed not just who sit here now claiming
their mantle, but it blessed this city, it blessed a rebuilding section of the
country, and it even blessed those in our state who would face an existential
plague some years later. And through it
all, they trusted and bore their crosses, knowing they would be redeemed by the
One who called them. Few can argue that His love was not manifested in their obedience.
The other reason I share the story is that
some of you will be participating on Zoom in the various Liturgy Committee
meetings for General Convention. Among
those discussions will be what figures should be included and what figures
should be excluded. In some places,
there is a desire to waive all waiting periods.
In other places, there is a desire to judge past figures with modern
sensibilities. For some odd reason,
people in our church think we are necessarily better and smarter than those who
came before. In one sense, I really
could care less whether the effort to remove Quintard is successful. He has gone to his reward, and I am certain
he has not only won the crown of glory, but that pastoring Adventers earned him
an extra gem or three! But, it has
always fallen to those local to the saints to be the ones who shared their stories,
who memorialized their work, to teach the rest of the Church about their
lives. It therefore falls to us to
remind the Church in which we minister of the work Quintard and Advent did in
those days. Might they ignore our
stories and determine their opinions are more important than the facts? Of course.
But, who knows what seeds will be planted, what faithful obediences will
be encouraged, what glory to God will come from something so simple as sharing
the life of our parish? We, better than
many parishes, can testify to God’s blessing on faithful obedience. He blessed Advent in its effort to include the
poor. He blessed Advent in its effort to
include slaves in worship. He blesses
Advent in its work to fight food insecurity.
He blesses Advent in its work to care for those struggling mental
illnesses. And, as He has always done, He
will bless all who are faithfully obedient to His calls!
In Christ’s
Peace,
Brian†
No comments:
Post a Comment