Our differences are gateways to a common salvation, but overcoming division is a difficult task. Today’s reflection encourages us to move beyond an “us and them” mentality, and reminds us that we have a clear path to follow in this task: loving one another as Christ does.

May 18, 2025: Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C
Acts 14:21–27
Psalm 145:8–13
Revelation 21:1–5a
John 13:31–35

Them and Us

A reflection by Lori F. Ranner

Sometimes it feels like our world is drowning in tragedy. Words like “shocking,” “horrific,” and “sickening” cease to carry any emotional heft, so frequently are they used to describe human experiences–often in real time, on display in word, sound, and image across digital media. Perhaps we must be more discriminating in our expressions of outrage, but where would one draw the line? How do we decide what to see, and when to look away? Which disasters are worthy of the strongest words of condemnation? Prisoners tortured and degraded, children made limbless and parentless by war, hollow-eyed survivors of disasters natural and unnatural: to remain muted in our response to these realities seems callous. But to apply the familiar litany of moral critique over and over, however fitting, risks cultivating a different kind of callousness in which the reader or viewer becomes numb from sheer overexposure, and the words themselves seem empty. How often do we follow those words with acts? Will we begin to care more, the more we see and complain? Or will we care even less? Will any of the horror or shock we feel stand a better chance of being translated into action because we have seen and then looked away, or does seeing the pictures and reading the words of someone else’s tragedy lull us into feeling like we’ve “done our bit” in our few minutes (or seconds) of empathy with the sufferers? If so, what can make a difference? When the sheer volume and obscenity of human suffering that we are presented with day after day cannot turn our hearts to action and real solidarity, what will?

We who are safe and well–for the moment–are constantly haunted by these ghosts: alienation, oppression, humiliation, hopelessness, happening somewhere, lived by someone. Ghosts that can be dismissed by switching windows on the computer screen, or scrolling a little bit further.

What will make us stop scrolling? What gives those ghosts flesh and blood, what gives them voices? Who are those brave, angry, or upset enough to do something about the evils in our midst? People like Pope Francis, for instance, for whom looking and listening–being a bystander–was never sufficient. The answer to these questions, and the antidote to our ennui regarding the tragedies around us, lies at the heart of this Sunday’s readings. It is an answer drawn from centuries of wrangling with one of the central problems of being human: the concept of them and us.

Most humans understand differences as frontiers. This is where you end, and I begin. The frontier is how we tell two things apart. This understanding develops from our earliest days of self-awareness, and retains ever after something of that infantile, narcissistic flavor. If you are not like me, you exist in opposition to what I am; the more differences I perceive, the less like me you are, and the more likely you are to pose a threat to my self-identity. Group identities are no different. Us and them: the others, the not-like, the different. If you aren’t like me, well, why not?

In an earlier chapter of Acts (11:1–18), Peter is dealing with fallout from this kind of exclusionist thought. He is getting serious pushback for opening up the Christian movement to Gentiles. “The circumcised believers criticized him, saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’”

Peter’s first and most obvious riposte might have been, because that’s what Jesus asked us to do: share the Good News with everybody. Jesus didn’t leave a helpful blacklist of “Those-Not-to-Be-Evangelized,” but somehow–given the proclivity of people to think in terms of them/us–in the few years since Jesus’ death, such a blacklist has clearly evolved. In his interlocutors, we have a classic example of gatekeeping: to be accepted by us, they must first become like us–if they can. Perhaps this response is born of insecurity, of threats either perceived or real. Our consciously defined characteristics are what make us special, and to de-emphasize those in order to widen the “in-group” to which we belong is to threaten the very nature of our self-understanding. How can we protect ourselves from threats if we aren’t even sure of who we are? The borders must be clearly marked in order to be defended.

Peter wisely sidesteps the legalistic showdown the complainers expect, where they can trot out all the traditional reasons why those outside the group must remain that way. Instead of an argument, he offers something new: a vision. It details his own experience of transcending prejudice and fear under the guiding hand of God. In the vision, God, the loving parent, provides sustenance, which Peter primly rejects as unworthy of consumption, according to the rules and laws in which he has been educated to follow on earth: “Nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.”

God’s rejoinder becomes the vehicle of Peter’s transformation, from one who sees only frontiers dividing the sacred from the profane into the person who pleads for the Gentiles, the person for whom all the world and its inhabitants are sacred because they are of God.

Notably, the “unclean” animals are not transformed into “clean ones;” the nature of the animals remains intact and individuated, but ceases to carry the connotation of being acceptable or condemned. “What God has made clean,” the voice from heaven commands, “you must not call profane.” Though we are different, all of us, everywhere, are made clean. Profanity only emerges from the categories upon which we impose judgement, which separate those we deem safe and worthy from the dangerous and worthless. In God’s view, there is no such division amongst the diversity of the created world and its inhabitants. Who are we to insist otherwise?

At this moment, Peter tells his audience, three men arrived at the house where he was staying from Caesarea, a Roman-majority town. Lingering upon him after his vision had ended, the Spirit told Peter to “go with them, and not to make a distinction between them and us.” Moreover, the man who received Peter and these others from Caesarea also had a vision, in which he was told to prepare for a message from Peter, “by which you and your entire household will be saved.”

After such events, what else could the message be but this: differences are not walls. Differences are gateways to a common salvation. We are all meant for each other, discovering who we are in reciprocity, not in opposition. This message–that God transcends distinctions based on judgement–is to recognize that we stand or fall together. Our oneness does not consist of a list of perceived common characteristics; it arises from our fundamental origin as God’s children. Peter pleads with his listeners, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in… Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could hinder God?”

Categories are necessary for living; they help us make sense of the world. Even in Genesis, God bids Adam to give each animal a name. But a name is not a judgement, and to use categories and distinctions as a means of distinguishing the worthy from the unworthy has no part in God’s plan.

The alternative is to see as God sees, as the author of today’s reading from Revelation tries to describe: “I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth.” In this kind of God-sight dwells not only meaning, but joy. “See the home of God is among mortals… God himself will be with them, and be their god; he will wipe 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.”

God dwells among mortals. It’s a pretty broad statement, no? Not among some mortals, the special, worthy ones–not even amongst humans, but amid the beings whose lifespan is measured between birth and death. Where God is, there can be no them, even in the most profuse expressions of variety. There can be no individual or group who can be safely set aside, overlooked, ignored, or forgotten. God dwells among us both in our differences and through the sameness of our common origin, for God is the author of both.

Them and us. God commands that Peter make no distinction. Yet in his catalogue of earthly wonders, the psalmist tells us that God not only “established them forever and ever,” but “fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed.” Mountains, animals, “[leaders] of earth and all the peoples,” all can never be other than what they are–but their very differences give God glory; the differences themselves are the source of the common praise that rises to the Creator. A painter who only paints one scene over and over is no artist but a hack. So too is God’s grandeur, as the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, inherently linked to the variety of Creation. And that variety in no way detracts from the value of each; rather, the distinctions of each serve to offset the distinctions of all the others. We are all made differently; it doesn’t take a baby very long to figure that out. Our differences are to the glory of our Creator, yet we share the same origin, and are nourished through one Love.

Now, perhaps by this point, you are growing impatient with me. Surely, a set piece about diversity and inclusion aimed at an LGBTQ+ audience is preaching to the choir. Part of our raison d’être is ensuring a welcome extended to everybody. What else should a rainbow signify?

Yet, even for those with a mandate of love and liberation and the best will in the world, this work is not so easy, as Peter discovered. His fellow Christians remain skeptical of radical inclusion and embracing difference. The pressing issue of what makes a Christian who they are will come to a head in a rancorous showdown known as The Council of Jerusalem, recorded a few chapters later in Acts. There, the majority were persuaded by Paul that to follow Christ doesn’t require a conversion to Judaism, but many left dissatisfied, still clinging to the notion of us and them. It is undoubtedly a tricky business to both affirm distinct identities and yet eschew exclusion of any kind–no wonder today’s second reading shows Paul and Barnabas putting a “fresh heart in the disciples… encouraging them to persevere in their faith.” Well and good, to see a new Jerusalem in your visions, but how do we apply that in real life?

Do we embrace this truth in our hearts and actions as well as in our words? Do we live by it as a community? This tightrope act of diversity and inclusion is built into the very acronym that stands for who we are. There is always room for improvement. More often than we would like to admit, an attachment to a particular understanding of the queer/LGBTQ+ us creates a barrier to the open-hearted, open-minded approach that Jesus exemplifies. DEI is not just other people’s work; it is God’s work, and as such, it is never finished until the coming of the Kingdom; as such, it is work that starts with an honest look at ourselves.

Jesus sees differences: he sees the Samaritan woman, the centurion, the tax collector, the demoniac; there is no advantage to lumping them all together under the rubric of “just folks.” Jesus takes care, in fact, to recognize the unique and blessed aspect of each individual. But he also sees past those aspects, to the heart. In today’s reading from John’s Gospel–a parting message to the disciples–Jesus urges them to embrace the new commandment: “You are to love each other the way I have loved you.” Here is our blueprint for how to untangle the problem of us and them. There is no more pressing work before us, for to untangle this knot is–as Jesus foresaw and bore witness to–the only manner in which harmony amongst us is achieved. Loving as Jesus loved, we feel the pain of any and all as our own; we are willing to sacrifice our well-being for that of the other; we no longer distinguish between worthy and unworthy, clean and profane. In such love, an attack on you, your home, or your family feels like an attack on my own. If your pain is my pain, your wound is my wound, then it’s much more likely that I’m going to do something–maybe whatever it takes–to help you heal.

We like being loved for who we are, not for whom we resemble. To love others as ourselves means to see them and feel about them as we see and feel about ourselves: as someone wonderfully different from every other human, yet deserving the same support and solidarity as I seek for myself. In this way, us and them cease to carry any divisive meaning, no longer separating the ones that matter from the ones for whom we offer words of outrage, of pity, or sympathy, and then look away. This is how the Reign of God will finally come.

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Lori Ranner is the author of five novels and the upcoming authorized biography of medievalist and LGBTQ+ Studies pioneer John Eastburn Boswell, to be published by Eerdmans in the coming year. She has taught classical languages and history at universities and high schools in the New Orleans area for twenty-three years.

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