"Not Strangers, but Neighbors" | Lisa Levy, Outreach Coordinator | July 28, 2024

John 6:1-21

Sunday, July 28th  

“‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.

But what are they among so many people?’”

In the Hill—one of New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods—on Rosette Street stands a small, dilapidated house nestled among many other small, dilapidated houses. Over the front door hangs a little wooden sign with one word painted on it: Amistad. It is the Amistad House of Hospitality, the city’s only Catholic Worker house. For those who may not be familiar, the Catholic Worker movement was founded by the writer and activist Dorothy Day in 1933. She wrote that “by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the worthy and unworthy poor, we can work for the oasis, a little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. There is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

Mark and Luz are the proprietors of Amistad, and they have opened the doors of that house to hundreds of people over the course of their thirty years there: people who are lonely, people who are sick, people who are unhoused, people who have nowhere else to go. Their commitment to radical hospitality and loving their neighbor as they live a Gospel life is unshakable. It was in the spirit of this commitment that, in October of 2023, Mark and Luz built six tiny houses in their small backyard, and invited unhoused folks with nowhere to go to move in. At any given time, there are between five and fifteen people living there. The tiny houses don’t have kitchens or plumbing, so they all share the kitchen and bathroom in the main house.

About a month ago, my friend Ashley and I stopped by Amistad one afternoon to drop off a donation. We ended up sitting for a couple of hours with the residents of the tiny houses, what they call “Rosette Village,” a place where unhoused people can stay while they stabilize their lives and get back on their feet. While Ashley sat at a picnic table talking with a French-speaking asylum-seeker from Senegal who was a resident there, I sat on the deck and played with an energetic white puppy named Ruckus. Ruckus belongs to Suki and Todd Godek, also residents of Rosette Village. Suki and Todd were busy making cardboard signs for an action that was scheduled to take place in front of City Hall later that day, a protest demanding an end to evictions of unhoused people from public land; an end to the police throwing away the belongings of unhoused New Haven residents; and the installation of permanent public bathrooms and showers on or near the New Haven Green. The whole place was a hive of activity; the entire time I was there, the back door was flung wide open, and people were continually going in and out of the main house. I talked to Suki a bit while she worked on the signs. Ruckus was in my lap, trying to bite my chin, while Bodhi, Mark and Luz’s elderly pit bull, lay at my feet. Suki told me that she believed that Rosette Village had saved her life: she was finally able to take her mental health medications daily, the way they were prescribed, without them being stolen on the street every couple of weeks.

The Gospel lesson for today is likely a familiar one for most of you: The doubting disciples once again underestimate Jesus’s saving power: we hear that Jesus feeds the crowd of 5,000 people by multiplying a young boy’s loaves and fish so that there is enough for everyone to eat until they are satisfied. The writer of the Gospel chose to place the passage between other miraculous events: Jesus’s healing the sick and Jesus walking on water, all “signs” of Jesus’s divinity.

One popular interpretation of the story that tries to explain the miracle in human terms says that the bountiful loaves and fish are brought forth not by Jesus’s miraculous powers but by the crowd themselves—that people who were hoarding their own provisions were so moved by the young boy’s willingness to give up his own loaves and fish that they decided to share their stashes with their neighbors. Scholar Karen Marie Yust writes that this interpretation “diminishes the formative potential of the story by downplaying the miraculous aspect. Instead of fostering an exploration of God’s ability to act in surprising ways and transform human expectations, this version of the story focuses on the ability of persons to solve their own problems…. God is no longer a miracle worker unbounded by human laws, but a social manipulator who reminds people to share. Behavioral modification replaces amazing grace as the core of the story, and God is reduced to a divine therapist counseling charity among a greedy people who already know better.”

But I think we can see this interpretation in a different way. How often is it our own impulse to hoard our limited resources, to grip them tightly and keep them close, as if there will only be enough for us? It isn’t out of greed, or it isn’t only out of greed; it is out of fear—fear that there won’t be enough. How very human to act from a place of scarcity; everything in our culture screams that our possessions, and even our gifts, are ours and ours alone.

So maybe the miracle that Jesus works isn’t the multiplying of the loaves and the fish; maybe the miraculous occurrence is a shift in the collective consciousness of the crowd from a mindset of scarcity toward a feeling of abundance. Maybe the miracle is that those who were keeping their provisions to themselves looked around them and suddenly saw not strangers, but neighbors. Maybe the miracle is Jesus moving people’s hearts toward a greater generosity, a greater compassion for one another. Maybe Jesus’s miracle was not a multiplication of food but a multiplication of love; a vision that moves from individualism to a vision of lives held in common.

Suki, the woman from Rosette Village, repeated a version of what she told me about how the village saved her life to the New Haven Register at a press conference the residents held this month, when, after contentious negotiations about whether the tiny houses in Amistad’s backyard were up to code, the City cut the electricity to Rosette Village in the middle of a dangerous heat wave. The City argues that the houses must meet State Building Code regulations; they say the structures don’t meet requirements

for foundation, insulation, and sanitary provisions, and that they just want the residents of the houses to be safe. The Rosette Village residents point out the absurdity of this argument: does sleeping on a piece of cardboard in the street meet the requirements for insulation and sanitary provisions? Where is the safety in that? As of today, the standoff between the City and Rosette Village continues.

Suki said something else at the press conference, something that pierced me.

she said: “The reason for the success of Rosette Village is that it literally restores unhoused individuals and families to the status of neighbor.” It isn’t primarily the roof over their heads or the regular sleep and meals or the relative safety that makes Rosette Village special. It is that Rosette Village literally restores unhoused people to the status of neighbor. A restoration of their inherent, God-given dignity. A restoration of their humanity. A restoration of hope. The neighbors who live at Amistad House and Rosette Village truly live out that life-in-common that we can imagine the crowd glimpses when it breaks bread together in today’s Gospel. Amistad’s orientation is one of abundance instead of scarcity, or perhaps even abundance in the face of scarcity. And even in the face of scarcity, they treat everyone as neighbors—and everyone is invited to the table to share in that abundance.

We live in a world where men spend billions of dollars to build private rocket ships to take them to space.

We live in a country where the Supreme Court has just declared that it is Constitutional for cities to arrest people for sleeping on the streets, even when there are no shelter beds available.

We live in a city where there is currently a thirty-day waiting list for the shelter.

We live in a city where, at St. PJ’s Episcopal Church in Wooster Square, 400 people line up every Saturday morning, in all kinds of weather, to wait for Loaves & Fishes food pantry to open so that they can get a single bag of groceries.

We live in a city where, around the corner from that very food pantry, people line up to wait for Sally’s Pizza to open for lunch. If Sally’s opened a little earlier, the two lines would cross each other. People touching people. Worlds touching worlds. Neighbors touching neighbors.

What if the people in line at Sally’s turned toward the people in line at the pantry? What if the Mayor of New Haven turned toward the people of Rosette Village? What if we did, too?

Do we live from a place of abundance, or from a place of scarcity? It is up to us. We get to choose. Jesus shows us over and over that compassion multiplies compassion; that love multiplies love. It is so easy to tighten our fists around what is ours and to remain in a scarcity mindset. But Jesus tells us to love one another, and love one another abundantly, just as he has loved us. Jesus tells us to see one another, to see every person we meet, NOT as a stranger but as a NEIGHBOR, and to live and love accordingly. To me, this is the true miracle. Let us go, and do likewise. Amen.