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Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. \u2026[Jonah] wanted to die, and said, \u201cIt would be better for me to die than to live.\u201d But God said to Jonah, \u201cIs it right for you to be angry about the plant?\u201d \u201cIt is,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m so angry I wish I were dead.\u201d But the Lord said, \u201cYou have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left\u2014and also many animals?\u201d (Jonah 4:6-7, 8b-11).

I was struck by something in a conversation with a person from our congregation this past week. They said that we tend to take the pre-COVID life that we knew here in North America as \u201cnormal.\u201d But it\u2019s not\u2014not compared to the rest of the world and most of world history. What we have known is luxury, nor normalcy.

The ability to travel, have time for vacation, the reality of disposable income, the education levels, the access to health care, the assumption of trust and safety\u2014these things and much more are all examples of luxury unlike anything most people have known through history or even know still today in many parts of the world\u2014including in significant sections of Canada. Remember, there are people living in this country, many of them indigenous, that still don\u2019t have access to clean drinking water.

I wonder: how much of our \u201cnormal\u201d fits in the category of Jonah\u2019s leafy plant? That is, the personal comforts we get attached to and feel entitled about that we didn\u2019t really tend or make grow, but that sometimes garner more concern from us than the wellbeing of our neighbours.

You might challenge me there and say that what you have came from your own hard work and is well deserved. But it\u2019s never quite so simple as that. There first has to be the necessities of life: access to food and water. The locust plaguing significant chunks of East Africa and Southwestern Asia right now prove that\u2019s not something to be assumed. You need a secure place to live\u2014a place free from war, hostilities, or corrupt government and law enforcement. You need health\u2014something quite fleeting as we are discovering again in the face of a new virus our health system cannot yet protect us against. You need certain skills, which no doubt you learned from someone else or had the time, money, and ability (through an education system) to become educated in\u2014all privileges built on top of the first things in this list.

Said differently, everything that we have is not our own doing, but is a gift. Undeserved. A privilege. And if God is indeed the author and giver of such gifts, then that means they are only ours to hold in trust for the sake of our neighbours, not to keep to ourselves.

This is not an attempt to shame us, but rather, an attempt at perspective. Perspective that we, like Jonah, sometimes lose.

God was just as much God over the hated Assyrians as He was God over Israel. God\u2019s compassion extended to all His Creatures\u2014even the sparrows and the cattle. But, God\u2019s compassion extended especially to those human people created in His image, even if Jonah\u2019s compassion did not.

We have indeed suffered losses through this time of COVID-19. But, I wonder, how many of those things were leafy plants? Gifts we were privileged to have for a time, but not entitled to? Have those leafy plant-gifts stood in the way of compassion for our neighbours?

Neighbours\u2014who at times have been people of colour, protesting on the streets because they have not always had the same gift of safety or security in this land. Neighbours\u2014who at times have been Indigenous people blocking roads and railways because they have not always had the same gifts of access to food, water, health, education, or the law.

We\u2019ve talked often of hospitality in these past days, and here it comes up again. If all that we\u2019ve had and continue to have is a gift, not a given\u2014then how might those gifts be shared out of God\u2019s kind of compassion with our neighbours?

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