"We Are All Human" | Shana McCauley | Sunday, May 18, 2025

We are well into the Easter season now, and through the lectionary, walking alongside the apostles who are wrestling with belonging and who Jesus's people are. People are meeting in unlikely ways and places and learning more about God through relationships with foreigners.

It seems that in our scripture and in our culture, we are talking about belonging at this moment. My mom grew up on a rice farm in Korea, and my dad in the inner city in Indianapolis, Indiana. They met in 1976 on a U.S. Air Force base in South Korea and married soon after—only 10 years after Loving v. Virginia, when anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

Miscegenation is an uncommon word these days. Webster calls it derogatory, but it means interracial breeding, especially when one of the two people is white. The 14th Amendment has been in the news quite a bit lately, as the president has challenged birthright citizenship, which is the right for anyone born in the United States to be a citizen.

Loving v. Virginia was overturned based on this sentence within that amendment: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Even as we have understood personhood differently in the history of this country, we have agreed that humans deserved some basic rights, regardless of differences—including eventually the right to marry.

Identity is complicated and unique to each individual, but there are some simpler characteristics that many of us start with. Those who are cisgendered identify with the sex we are assigned at birth. If you imagine garments on a rack, this is one that I was able to put on straight from the rack, and most of you would recognize it. It's uncomplicated in that way. I was assigned female and am a woman.

This is a privilege. It makes my life easier that I don't have to explain my gender identity to you, and the way that people automatically refer to me is the way that I refer to myself.

Many of us have these kinds of characteristics—ways that we live into assumptions, like age, ability, and language. Most of the people—I think all of the people—in this room are adults, and many of us speak English.

For me, the complicated place is around race and ethnicity. And ethnicity. Race is a social construct. We are all humans, and that is our race. But colloquially, when we say race, we are referring to an intersection of ancestral, geographical, and physical traits.

I am ethnically ambiguous. Yesterday, a friend tagged me in an all call for Indigenous actors in Oregon. Regularly, people just begin to speak Spanish to me. Those are the two races people assume most—Indigenous and Latina. I would be honored to be among either of those groups, and I did honestly think I could go as an Indigenous person. They would never know.

As a biracial person who truly looks a little like both of my parents, people don't know where to place me. The garment that I took off the rack is unclear, so I don't fit easily in among white people or among Asians or Koreans. It means that, internally, I have always felt like a bit of a misfit, like someone who doesn't belong, like I always have to justify my being in a particular group. Oh no, my dad is white—or no, no, my mom is Korean.

This is true for many of you too—maybe for the same reasons as me, but likely for many other reasons as well. I have often felt a bit of jealousy for those who are biracial and look more like one or the other of their parents. It feels like that would be easier, to somehow fit into one category, though I know there's a lot of grass-is-greener going on there.

Barack Obama was our first Black president because he looks more like his dad. But being Black doesn't often make one's life easier.

Last fall, I was invited to a conference. Our conferences, I'm learning, are getting very, very specific in the Episcopal Church, so get ready for this. This was a conference for Episcopal clergy who are multiracial Asian, right? All of us have a white parent and an Asian one.

We weren't a big group, but to sit in a group with people who have had such a similar experience to mine—talk about belonging. There were things that I've said this morning that I didn't have to explain to these folks. All of them have had to explain their presence in a group before, how they belong, or to answer literally the question, "What are you?"

The garment that we all got from the rack—it is unusual. But in this one room, we had gathered as a group who all got the same one. For a few days at an Airbnb in Virginia, I was part of a group like me. I belonged, and I could process with folks who also struggle with how to identify themselves in groups. Do you say that you're half and half? Or did your parents give you an Asian name and a white name?

That conference helped me to collect and own all of me—to give voice to and retire identifiers that don't make sense, like half and half. No human can be half and half. We are all whole. And to claim identifiers that are mine: I am Korean. I am Caucasian.

And people will probably not see that when they look at me, but I don't have to be apologetic when I tell people. I can just speak it for the truth it is. I came home tired, but complete in a way that I didn't know I could feel.

It is the gift of completeness, of belonging, that God wants for each of us. If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God? Peter explained.

See, Jesus's followers are feeling a kind of dislocation in this moment. They have started life understanding themselves in a certain way, grabbing a coat off that rack, and then Jesus has come and changed everything. It's exhilarating—you can hear this in Luke's account in Acts—but it is also disorienting. They don't recognize themselves, so they don't know how to find their people in each other.

Peter goes to Jerusalem, and the people who know themselves to be Jesus's people are confused about who Peter has been hanging out with—even eating with. "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?" the circumcised believers criticize.

Peter explains that he was praying in Jabba, and he had a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners. He says, "As I looked at it closely, I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, 'Get up, Peter, kill and eat.'" But I replied, "By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth."

Peter is talking to a group that he has full membership in. We hear this from Paul also, again and again in the epistles. He was born—Peter and Paul were born into the faith, went through the correct rites of passage, abided the laws.

We have cultural norms around food. Horse, in the United States, is a social no-go, while in other parts of the world, it is normal. But in Jesus's time, not only would food have been something that identified who people were ethnically—it would have done so religiously. The circumcised understood what they were allowed to eat, and with whom, so everyone else were outsiders. They don't belong with Jesus's people.

But the voice in the vision tells Peter to eat the unclean animals three times. And when he wakes up, three men have come to take him to Cesarea. "The Spirit told me to go with them and not make a distinction between them and us," he says. We get glimpses of how unbelievable this was for the apostles and the believers, because this chapter begins with them challenging Peter.

It began to happen when Jesus was among them, when he ate with foreigners and bad people. But in the days and weeks after Jesus's resurrection, his intimates—his friends, his apostles, his followers—are learning that they need to do it too. The requirements of belonging have changed. Suddenly, that garment that people took off the rack means something else entirely. The foundational, basic identifiers are changing.

Does that sound at all familiar in this moment? Once, you could look at what someone else was wearing and know what their pronouns were. You could look around and know by skin color and clothing what people's food and prayer lives looked like. All of a sudden, God changed everything.

The apostles and believers were in a moment of significant cultural shift—not the changing of fashion, but the changing of who gets to belong and why. If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God? Peter asks.

Sometimes, progress happens in bigger earthquakes—when we get glimpses of what God hopes for us, and we make leaps to get a little closer. Through Jesus, we learned what birthright citizenship could look like—not by accidents of geography or however we understood race at this particular moment, but through the complete perfection of the love of God.

For Jesus's followers, it was incomprehensible, and then unbelievable, and then something that many of them began to get their heads around. Toward the end of Acts, their map has gotten so much bigger, so much wider. There are new names among them.

So for you: What does it take to belong at Trinity Cathedral, a small and sacred part of this kingdom? What does it mean to belong? Who doesn't belong here? Would God's answer be different than ours?

In the Revelation to John, he offers us a new heaven: "The first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.'"

Through Jesus, God is among us—literally among us—and we have this opportunity to be heaven. God offers us birthright citizenship that can never be challenged or changed or taken away. It is ours, always. Through Jesus, God took away crying and death and has come among us once and for all.

This belonging, this citizenship, invites us to be the whole humans we are created to be. And for this free and perfect gift, the Spirit urges us to share with each other not only my full self, but for me to make room and invitation for you to be your full self with me. It's messy and hard. We aren't doing it perfectly, because there is still grief and sorrow, and because it is not quite heaven on earth yet.

Jesus showed us how to do everything, and we all have to keep working to get better at it. But in every way that we are—in every garment that we take off that coat rack—we are perfectly loved. If I can live into and love the fullness that I am, it will make room for others too.

Who are you? How does God adore every word in the way that you answer that question, and in the words you cannot think to say? And how—how do you and I, how do we help others to see God's deep pleasure at who each of us is?

That is everything we have to do as Christians. Jesus told us this. He said, on his very last night, that we are to love each other and to love God. That is it.

Who do we belong to? To God. Who do they belong to? Also God.

For if then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?

Amen.

[Applause]