Covenant

And considering Covenant again:

Time after time the subject of *covenant* emerges, so here's a little more:

Modulating into a different key for a moment, I love thinking of the church sanctuary as a place of safety, of prayer and worship, and especially as a place where our covenanting God and the people of God meet in a unique and focused way, preparing the people to recognize God's presence wherever God and people encounter each other. I've quoted this song before on this blog:

I, the Lord of font and cup,
covenant to lift you up.
Splash the water, break the bread; pour out your lives.
Faithfully my love you'll show,
so their hearts will always know,
They are mine eternally...

© Linda LeBron, 2002

God of the Covenants: God is the ultimate Covenant-Maker, Covenant-Keeper and the One who enables us to keep covenant, most spectacularly in the Christ Event.

Karl Barth, Dogmatics!

Since prior to seminary I've been major Barth fan and reading his Dogmatics was one of my fave assignments, but I'll say "animals, plants, rocks and the rest of creation" indeed to have a redemptive covenant given and fulfilled by the Covenant-Maker and Covenant-Keeper, and we know well of it, from the witness of our Scriptures and from our lives in the created and reconciled world.

Covenanted persons:

Please see my earlier post, "Christians and Covenantal Community," from Sunday, February 27, 2004...it bears the essence of what I want to say.

Living within our Baptismal Covenant:

Check out my Friday, 21 May 2004 post, "Living Baptized: a few more notes."

We live out our baptism within that covenanted community and in the world, for the world...

Those New England Puritans!

Covenants pervaded their lifestyle and sensibility, and for the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of the making of covenants there was no end! There were cosmic, national, state, church, tribal, social, political, communal and family covenants; there was a covenant of redemption and a covenant of grace, as well as covenant philosophy. According to the Federalists, God never had dealt with humanity in any way other than that of covenant, and since God's covenant action recorded in the Bible was intended as the prototype and model for earthly action, no area of human activity could be outside of the bounds of this idea. On a closely related note, in the obligatory Hebrew Bible survey in seminary we *had* to read Delbert Hiller's Covenant: the History of a Biblical Idea, and the professor informed us if we didn't understand that book, if we didn't understand the concept of covenant, we wouldn't understand our seminary education!