"The Truth-Tellers" | Liz Harlan-Ferlo | Sunday, June 1, 2025

It is a season for special occasions: graduations, commencements. And this week, I got to attend a very special occasion. I'm not just talking about Trinity Trivia Night—that was very special, yes, um—but this was actually a service in this room.

It was a very small service. At the end of five months of weekly classes and discussions, the participants in the catechuminate, the catechumens, gathered to share a Eucharist of their own design.

It followed, of course, the patterns of Rite Two, as we do today. But alongside each major element of the service, the participants—the participants—reflected on the purpose of that element and on its meaning to them.

To witness that was deeply moving to me.

See, I have been an Episcopalian pretty much since before I was born. My parents met in an Episcopal parish and married there, and that is where I was baptized.

I grew up in other Episcopal parishes as a preacher’s kid. So the Episcopal Church was more of a constant background noise than a devotional endeavor. Sometimes it was literally background noise, when I was in the rectory next door and the big church windows were open.

Because of that, I grew up feeling a cultural kinship less with Protestants, but more with Catholics like my father's Italian family, and with Jewish folks, who were the majority of my school friends in Pittsburgh and New York City.

Religion was something that you were, not something you chose. And you didn't earn it, and you couldn't get rid of it. So I was Episcopalian, and that was that.

So hearing folks who—like many of you—have chosen this faith to follow is moving to me. And to hear it in the season in which we read from the Acts of the Apostles is particularly appropriate.

Over and over in these stories, we see people choosing to follow the Way, as the early Christians referred to it.

We heard one story this morning about one of the few women mentioned in the New Testament: an unnamed enslaved woman who is a fortune teller.

Some scholars believe that she may have been one of the oracle priestesses from Delphi, far south of Philippi. But now she was under the control of people who took advantage of her gifts to make money.

We don't know much about her—whether any of her work brought her joy or sadness, whether she ever had a share in what people offered her for prophesying about their lives.

But we do know that when she got a whiff of Paul and Silas, she did not let them go.

"While she followed Paul and us," says the text, "she would cry out, 'These men are slaves of the Most High, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.'"

She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour.

Now, over those many days, I'm sure that Paul made it very clear that he was unhappy with her. Likely, she was pretty bad for his optics—what he was trying to do.

So there wasn't any money to be made for her. Yet she continued to follow him.

Now, written the way it is, the narrative is set up to dismiss her. Even the language that is used in our translation—fortune teller—has a certain mockery.

And after Paul calls the spirit out of her, the story abandons her. We only learn what happens to him.

And yet, says biblical scholar Christy Cobb, this enslaved woman is an important biblical truth-teller.

Sure enough, later in the text, Paul will refer to himself as a slave of God. And certainly, Paul will go on to have influence in proclaiming a way of salvation beyond his wildest dreams.

This story—this very story of Paul and Silas—was remembered by another woman truth-teller closer to our own time.

Miss Fannie Lou Hamer was born 108 years ago this fall, and she worked as a sharecropper in Mississippi all her life. And once she became aware of the movement for voting rights, joined it enthusiastically.

In 1963, she was arrested when running a voter registration drive. And in jail, the jailers made men beat her so savagely that she sustained kidney damage and almost lost the use of her eyes.

The following day, still in her cell, she began to sing the gospel song about Paul and Silas—loud enough for her fellow prisoners to hear and to gain strength:

Paul and Silas, bound in jail,

Had no money for their bail.

Paul and Silas began to shout:

"Jail doors open and they walked out."

The next year, she was invited to testify about this ordeal. And during that testimony, when it was scheduled to be aired, President Johnson—perhaps a little annoyed like Paul—staged an impromptu press conference, for fear of the power of her story.

And yet, this truth-teller's story has been remembered and continues to work in us today.

So how often do we become annoyed, as Paul does, when truth-tellers are—

With truth-tellers in particular, who are people who are marginalized—genders that make us uncomfortable, people who live in enslavement?

What other truth-tellers tell us uncomfortable truths about ourselves, about God?

In the gospel today, Jesus prays, "Righteous Father, they do not know you."

And we don't. We try. The religion that we practice is awash in our own interpretations and metaphors.

And there is one especially that we like a lot. You can hear it in our hymnody. It was in the psalm. Over and over, we call God king. We proclaim his martial victory. We do it the same way our Anglican forebears did when they arrived at a land uninvited and claimed it for themselves.

Jesus keeps trying to tell us about God, and we just struggle, and struggle, and struggle to hear what he is trying to tell us.

Our meager understanding of the creator God is filtered through our lens of imperial power, through our lenses of disciplinary fathers.

No wonder that so many people turn away from Christianity. They are not wrong to question what on earth it can offer to a world that sees all the pain and suffering caused by imperialism and patriarchy.

And so the participants in catechesis are doubly brave: to show up in a church of their own free will, to commit themselves to a community of learners, to allow themselves the vulnerability to try to love God in public—and for some of them, to proclaim the love of God again after a long estrangement.

To affirm that they have chosen this church, this practice, this place, is to me deeply humbling.

To self-identify as a slave of the Most High is a risky endeavor, whether you are in Philippi or Portland, Oregon.

In the story from Acts, we often want to imagine ourselves as the jailer, who is saved by Paul and later welcomed into the faith. But what of that enslaved woman with the gift of spiritual truth-telling?

What if we are she—caught up in the social web of commerce and control, selling our gifts to line someone else's pocket?

We don't know what became of her. Did she convert? Did she go free? Was she condemned to worse slavery once her gift was gone? We simply aren't told.

And truly, we live out that narrative ambiguity in our own lives.

We have only the present moment and nothing more.

If we continue to speak the truth of Jesus—to feed the hungry, to shield the dying, to care for the poor and sick—will we too lose the gifts that give us our place in the world?

Jesus prays for unity:

"I ask not only on behalf of these," he prays,

"but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,

that they may all be one.

The glory that you have given me I have given them,

so that they may be one, as we are one—

I in them, and you in me—

that they may be completely one,

so that the world may know that you have sent me

and have loved them even as you have loved me."

Like everything else of God, divine unity is not what we might expect.

This unity of God is not a silencing. It is not a tense agreement that only for a short time resembles peace. Neither is it a melting down of all of us.

God is not asking that we shed all of our uniqueness, all of who we are, to be part of the whole.

As we will see in the next weeks, as we mark the coming of the Holy Spirit and the teaching of the Trinity, God's idea of unity is about to blow our minds.

And as we're not quite there yet, today, on our last day with our beloved full choir, I invite you to imagine God's unity as music—as polyphony.

Polyphony, where multiple musical lines that can stand alone as the melody all weave in and out of each other.

Do you remember not so long ago, when we could not sing together—when infection and fear and danger kept us away from churches and from choirs?

A few months in, technologically savvy musicians figured out how we could sing again. Maybe you saw those videos. Maybe you participated in one.

Each singer in their own black-edged rectangle, headphones on or earbuds in, carefully counting beats, singing out alone into a hundred individual rooms.

They sang, believing that their separate voices would somehow be joined in unity by a great invisible power.

May we understand that we are loved like that.

Amen.