A Covenant with Every Living Thing (for June 27 and July 1)

Mountain bluebird nesting box, Patit Road

"The Biblical narrative affirms the interconnectedness and interdependence between creatures within God's creation. Nowhere is this more evident that in the story of Noah and the flood. After a protracted period of wickedness, God was 'sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart'. So God warned Noah that God was sending a terrible flood to destroy the earth, and that he should prepare for it by building an ark.
"But as every Sunday school child knows, God did not instruct Noah to save only himself and his family on the ark. Rather, God said: 'Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth.'
"We are all, quite literally, in the same boat--each creature playing its own unique, essential role in the future of the earth. We might not understand the role of each creature, why the unclean animals as well as the clean animals serve a purpose. But God asks Noah, and us, to protect them on the ark anyway, because God has intertwined our futures.
"After the terrible flood was over, God made God's first covenant with humanity, well before the covenant with Abraham or with Moses. ...Biblical covenants are not just unilateral promises on God's part. They always invite a response. As Noah's heirs, we inherit this covenant with God and the other earth creatures.

John Muir wrote, "The man of science, the naturalist, too often loses sight of the essential oneness of all living beings in seeking to classify them in kingdoms, orders ... species ... etc... while the eye of the poet, the seer, never closes on the kinship of all God's creatures, and his heart ever beats in sympathy with great and small alike as 'earth-born companions and fellow mortals' equally dependent on Heaven's eternal love."

• How do we as individuals respond to God's covenant?
• How do we as a faith community respond to God's covenant?
• What's the difference between a food chain and a food web?
• How do you experience yourself in the food web?