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A weekly sermon podcast from Ojai, California. Grounded in scripture and open to the world, these reflections invite you to listen, wonder, and live the story.
When a church thinks about a community garden, as we did in our watershed discipleship discussion today, there are practical questions to ask. What will grow here? Where will the water come from? Who will tend the beds?
Beneath them is another question:
Who is this garden for?
We might begin with those who will work in it, neighbors who could share its harvest, children who could learn there, or someone who needs a place to sit.
Then we might notice the other lives already involved. The creatures in the soil. The insects visiting the flowers. The birds looking for food.
The longer we attend to a piece of earth, the more company we discover.
Today’s reading from Jonah ends with God drawing attention to some easily overlooked company.
“And also many animals.”
Those are the closing words of the book. God has been speaking about whether Nineveh should be destroyed or spared. And God makes sure the animals are included.
Jonah has a much narrower concern.
He is angry because God has shown mercy to people Jonah wanted punished. Nineveh has turned from its evil ways, and God has spared it.
Jonah knows what God is like: gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.
His difficulty is that God has been gracious to these people.
So Jonah goes outside the city and waits. A plant grows over him, offering shade, and he is delighted. When a worm attacks the plant and it withers, he is distraught.
You care about this plant, God says. You did not make it grow. Yet its loss matters to you.
Should this city not matter to me?
And also its animals?
There is something painfully recognizable about Jonah. He discovers how much a plant matters when he needs its shade.
We can be like that. A tree becomes precious when it cools our house. Water commands our attention when the supply fails.
God begins with what Jonah already cares about. But God will not let his concern end at the edge of his own comfort.
Can we learn to care for life whose value does not depend on its usefulness to us? For people beyond our familiar circle? For creatures we rarely notice? For what will grow here after we are gone?
The book ends before Jonah answers.
We are left with God’s question.
Then Jesus tells us about another group struggling with generosity.
A landowner hires workers for his vineyard throughout the day. Even near its end, he finds people still waiting. Why? “Because no one has hired us.” When evening comes, everyone receives the usual daily wage.
Those who labored all day object. They have endured the heat and worked longer. But listen to their complaint: “You have made them equal to us.”
The landowner has kept his agreement with them. What troubles them is what the others have received.
Jonah resents mercy for Nineveh. The early workers resent generosity toward those who came late. In both readings, generosity exposes the boundaries people have placed around who should benefit.
That is a piercing word for a church.
Some people have labored here for years, often without much recognition. That work deserves gratitude.
And the community still needs to make room for someone arriving today.
Our Community Garden gives us a concrete place to practice that welcome. Someone may bring years of experience. Someone else may need to learn how to plant a seed. Some can dig for an hour; others cannot kneel at all.
The Garden Guild’s vision invites us to consider: Who could find a welcome here? How might neighbors help shape what happens? How might care for soil, water, and other creatures become our shared responsibility?
The soil needs care whether or not we learn a spiritual lesson from it. The creatures sharing this place have lives of their own, held within God’s concern.
And the garden can teach us about the other places entrusted to us: a household, a friendship, a workplace, a ministry. We might think of these as gardens of our lives.
What is growing in them? What have we neglected because something louder keeps claiming our time?
A friendship can become dry through inattention. A household can become so crowded with obligations that there is little room to listen. A church ministry can become so familiar to those who tend it that a newcomer cannot find a way in.
Am I caring for this because it gives me shade, or can I make room for what someone else needs?
That might mean listening without deciding in advance what another person should say. It might mean welcoming a new idea into something we have tended for years, or offering care that will never be repaid.
During this Season of Creation, Christians are gathering around the theme of Living Water.
We can prepare a bed and plant carefully, but we cannot persuade a seed to live without what sustains it.
Our lives need replenishment too. Those who offer care also need to receive it. Prayer, rest, friendship, and worship sustain our attention to others. God’s generosity includes us.
A garden teaches patience as well. We cannot pull a seedling taller. We cannot make trust grow by demanding it. We can prepare conditions in which life has room to flourish, and keep showing up to tend it.
Paul calls his continuing life in Christ “fruitful labor.” There is work he can still do for others’ progress and joy.
In today’s collect, we prayed to love things heavenly while living among things that pass away. A passing thing can still be precious. Jonah’s plant was fragile, and its shade mattered. Our bodies are mortal, and their hunger matters.
To love the things of God is to learn God’s care for the life before us.
The psalm imagines one generation telling another about God’s works. Our garden could be a place where that happens: someone teaching a child, a congregation leaving healthy ground in another generation’s hands.
Our relationships can carry that inheritance too. People remember being welcomed. Care received can become care offered, reaching farther than we will ever see.
Here is ground we can tend. Here are lives we can attend to.
And we begin as people who have already received mercy. In Jesus Christ, God’s generosity has reached us. We do not have to earn our place before we can begin to share it.
So as we consider our Community Garden, and all the places in our lives that need tending, let us ask:
Who is this garden for?
May God help us discover a fuller answer than the one we brought with us.
May we receive the gifts of this earth with gratitude, tend them with patience, and share them with joy.
And may we remember, with God, the lives we might otherwise overlook.
“And also many animals.”
Amen.