Variety: 1 Kings 21v1-3, 17-19

1 Some time later there was an incident involving a vineyard belonging to Naboth the Jezreelite. The vineyard was in Jezreel, close to the palace of Ahab king of Samaria. 2 Ahab said to Naboth, ‘Let me have your vineyard to use for a vegetable garden, since it is close to my palace. In exchange I will give you a better vineyard or, if you prefer, I will pay you whatever it is worth.’  3 But Naboth replied, ‘The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors.’ 

17 Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite: 18 ‘Go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, who rules in Samaria. He is now in Naboth’s vineyard, where he has gone to take possession of it. 19 Say to him, “This is what the Lord says: have you not murdered a man and seized his property?”  (1 Kings 21v1-3, 17-19)

We can begin to heal that rift between our love and actions, our values and our daily lives, by turning our attention to whatever patch of ground we have been given to tend, even if it is a potted planter on a balcony in the city.

An avid bird watcher, Anglican priest Ragan Sutterfield reflects on what it means to practice hospitality to nature in its many forms:  

Hospitality, in the Christian understanding, is at the heart of all existence, the creation itself. Nothing exists of necessity, all is an extravagance—a gift of the God who made room for the creation…. What if part of what that means is that we too are meant to make room—that part of being fully human is to open up space for other creatures? 
Sutterfield suggests ways we can disrupt the commodification of nature and act hospitably:  
To plant a garden, to create a wetland—these seem like small acts in the face of our world of concrete, our obsession with never-ending economic growth. What difference can it make? I think of G. K. Chesterton’s comment, in his wonderful economic critique, The Outline of Sanity, which takes aim at industrial capitalism’s takeover of small shops and farms:
Do anything, however small, that will prevent the completion of the work of capitalist combination. Do anything that will even delay that completion. Save one shop out of a hundred shops…. Keep open one door out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison. Ahab has not his kingdom so long as Naboth has his vineyard [1 Kings 21]. Haman will not be happy in the palace while Mordecai is sitting in the gate [Esther 5:9–13]….

Hospitality is more than resistance, however; it is also a sacramental practice—a way by which we learn to recognize the holy in the wild lives around us. “There are no unsacred places,” writes Wendell Berry, “there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” The practice of reconciliation ecology is an act in which we relate to the world in its sacredness, keeping ourselves from seeing it as a mere landscape or an interchangeable abstraction for our desires.
I think here of the Orthodox churches of Ethiopia, many of which preserve a belt of forest around their buildings to resemble a renewed Eden. Those sacred forests are now providing the seeds for restoration in the larger landscape, which has been decimated by extractive agriculture. What if we kept alive our yards, the marginal places in the midst of our cities, our places of worship and work, as sacred—not only as places of hospitality for the wild now but also as sources of hospitality for the future? What if each yard could host the future of the planet by holding onto the life needed to reseed the world when we finally wake from the delusions of our extractive ways of life?