The Baptismal Covenant: Part 3

This episode of Speaking of Faith, Bishop DeDe and Adam continue their exploration of the Baptismal Covenant, turning their attention to the Holy Spirit. Together, they unpack what it means to speak about faith in a divided world, exploring how the Spirit moves in us and through us to bring compassion, humility, and understanding. The conversation touches on the Apostles’ Creed, the nature of sin and forgiveness, and how our ideas about gender shape the way we understand the divine. Listeners are invited to reflect on how the Holy Spirit helps us see the image of God in one another and calls us into deeper dialogue and grace.

Highlights:

• The Holy Spirit’s role in shaping how we live and speak our faith
• The Apostles’ Creed as a foundation for belief and community
• Gender and language in understanding the divine
• Seeing the image of God in everyone we meet
• Sin as a condition we live in, not just our actions
• Forgiveness and compassion as central to Christian life
• Cultivating humility, dialogue, and beauty in faith conversations

AI Disclosure: To support our staff in their limited time, many of our episode summaries are first generated by AI and then edited by the Communications Director to accurately reflect and preview our podcast episodes.

Transcript

Bishop DeDe (00:02.404)
Hey friends, welcome to the podcast, Speaking of Faith. Something that's a little bit hard to do these days is to speak of our faith. It seems like there's so much division and then people just assume what you mean. And so I think it's so important that we develop our skills, relearn our ability to talk to each other, to speak of our faith, to bring our faith into our conversations in ways that are authentic and invitational and affirming for ourselves and for others.

My name is DeDe Duncan-Probe. I am the Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. I'm joined by Adam Eichelberger, who is our Director of Communications. And I'm so glad to have this time with you, whatever your background may be, to speak about speaking of faith, a little bit of a meta discourse in a way, but also an opportunity for us to prepare and develop our ability to actually articulate what we believe.

And so we're in the midst of a series. If you listen to the previous podcast, we've just begun to talk about how we speak about the real tenets of our faith, the foundational aspects. For those of us in the Episcopal Church, if you're in the Methodist Church, Catholic Church, there's a number of churches that affirm the baptismal covenant with some little changes here and there. I will be focused on the Episcopal understanding of the

covenant we make and baptism, also known as the Apostles' Creed. The covenant is taking the Apostles' Creed and putting it into a responsive form. So we actually are asked questions and then we respond to them. And a covenant, I want to affirm, is like any covenant, whether it's wedding,

Bishop DeDe (01:56.888)
Only one?

Okay, whether it's a wedding vow that we make, whether it's a covenant we make with a friend that we're going to always be there for them, we take the baptismal covenant as a serious vow we make before God, who we say God is and how we say we're going to respond to God. And so the covenant has different aspects to it. Last week, we started out talking about

that we're professing a faith in God the Father, God the Son, and Jesus Christ. And this week we pick up with the next question, which is, you believe in God the Holy Spirit? And so then our response in the baptismal covenant is who we say the Holy Spirit is. And so this is what the actual bidding says. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Now interestingly, when we talked about believing in God, we say we believe that God created all. When we talk about Jesus, we talk about the life of Jesus. And here, almost sounds like a little bit of a change in subject. When we say we believe in God the Holy Spirit, we talk about the aspect or the impacts of the Holy Spirit, not the Holy Spirit.

per se. We say, believe in the Holy Spirit. And then we go right into the Holy Catholic Church, the community of saints, forgiveness of sins. And it can sound a little bit like we're avoiding a topic. Who do we say the Holy Spirit is? Down through the centuries, this has been one of those places in the church where there's been a great deal of dialogue and debate and conversation. In Jesus's time and in the Hebrew scriptures, Ruach, moved over the deep,

Bishop DeDe (03:55.268)
this understanding of the spirit of God and ruach being a female word is curious. And then you get to the Vulgate and with spiritu, are, excuse me, Greek, numma, you have this neutral and then spiritu, you have it male. And so when we're talking about genders of God, it is the Holy Spirit that often people start to talk about God as a woman or the spirit as a woman and you'll hear people.

at times when they'd say the Nicene Creed or in other places refer to the Holy Spirit uniquely as she. The Spirit is female because really I think hearkening back to the Hebrew scriptures, but also a desire to figure out how to incorporate another identity into the Godhead, the Trinity with females because we have choices. Either we say, God is all male,

all the time, 24-7, and then it raises the question of, well, who are women created in the image of? Are we left out? And some theologians, I won't name them, Aquinas, but some of them really believe that was true, that women were not of God, that divine is male. And...

down through the centuries, this has been debated. And even today, in your church or in your location, if you talk about God as a woman, there's going to be someone who's going to take offense or get a little spicy about that. And so we have to recognize that inherent in our understanding of God is our understanding of ourselves, of who we are, of gender and what's important to us. So when we talk about saying,

that we believe in God, we must first identify that we come to this with an assumption, with a desire to see ourselves as part of something or with a desire to see something we value as part of God. And so I think that this bidding with, you believe in the Holy Spirit is the one that really deserves in some ways a lot of unpacking for us. And so I ask you listener,

Bishop DeDe (06:12.014)
Who is the Holy Spirit to you? How do you know the Holy Spirit? What is the way in which you relate to this conversation even? When you hear that the Spirit has been thought of as female, how does that sit with you? Is it uncomfortable? Is it hopeful? Is it freeing? Each of us comes to this conversation when we're going to speak of our faith with our uniqueness, our own understanding. And part of this empowerment

is learning how to, with generosity, with humility, with kindness and compassion, talk about what's important to us about the Holy Spirit. Now, the communion of saints, let me back up here when we talk about that the Holy Catholic Church is the next thing that comes up, and it is Little C, and the Episcopal Church, we talk about Little C, this isn't the Roman Catholic Church, this is

the entirety of Christendom that I believe in, and that we are all about God. We may have different ways of understanding, we may have different things we embrace here or there, but all of us together comprise this kingdom of God that Jesus talks about us building, that we believe that the Holy Spirit is what gathers us, the Spirit that moves in us and holds us together. I think of when I'm in churches,

And especially when I'm in a church maybe that's not Episcopal or different, and I can feel that Spirit of God that is present there too, or when you're out by the ocean, or when you feel this movement of the Spirit that holds all things in tension. God as this force, and I've used gravity before to talk about God, but God as a force in all that is.

that we believe that God is part of all things. And so in that, the Spirit is part of all things. The communion of saints that are gathering when we are together here, two or three are gathered with Adam and I gathered, the Jesus in our midst, and that all of Christendom, people known and unknown, Peter, Paul, all of God's people, the communion of saints, that what gathers us

Bishop DeDe (08:34.784)
now and always is God the Spirit, God's movement as the Spirit gathering us. And then of course the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Good heavens, if we talk about all of these things in this podcast, it's gonna get very long. So I'm actually gonna push pause there and we may get to those or we may cover those in the upcoming podcast. I don't wanna rush through this.

Because I really, really believe that in this time with Christian nationalism being so much in the fore, with all the conversations about division among Christians, when you look at how people are using their belief system to hammer other people, to divide, to put down, to dehumanize, I want us to go slowly with this and to be attentive to what do you believe?

And then how can we speak about what we believe with invitation and with compassion and with some certainty, with some, you we want to know what we believe. So we don't want to be just sort of wishy washy about it. But we also want to make sure that we're not really, you know, separating from one another, dehumanizing one another, get stuck there on separating dehumanization.

We don't want to be putting others down. We want to allow the conversation to bring out what we believe and to become attentive to what we believe. Often with God, especially when we're talking about our faith, there's a lot of assumption that goes into it. We just assume that when we say Holy Spirit, everybody's got the same answer. Instead of saying, what do we really mean? And how do we talk about that we believe in the Holy Spirit?

the communion of saints, that God is in all through all. So I've said a lot of things here, Adam, and I'm gonna welcome you into the conversation with your questions and feedback, because I think this is such an important topic for us to speak our faith.

Adam Eichelberger (10:50.465)
Absolutely. And one of the first things that stood out to me was you were talking about this bishop is when we get into affirming what it is that we believe first and foremost about the Holy Spirit.

Bishop DeDe (11:02.65)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (11:04.481)
It's interesting to me and I guess it maybe took me all this time to really point out or to really understand that in all language throughout scripture, as I've understood it in English, because I'm going to be the first to admit to all of you who are listening or watching, I'm not a scriptural scholar. I don't have a doctorate or anything like that, but I have a pretty good understanding of scripture. Like it just kind of light bulb went off recently that that the Holy Spirit isn't used with gendered language.

And especially in the creed, we don't get that. But I like what you said about the idea that this this understanding of the Holy Spirit helps us better understand, I think, the image and likeness of God, the Imago Dei that we're called to recognize within one another. So the first thing I kind of was wondering about when we talk about the Holy Spirit is how can we better

align ourselves or attune ourselves to see the image of God in the people that are around us, especially as you talked about when we started the episode, when we feel like things are so combative and we feel like we're at such odds and ends with one another. Like how do we better see the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit and other people?

Bishop DeDe (12:26.106)
such, it's so, I mean, listener, I don't know about you, you probably are way ahead of me on this, but it is, that is such a great question. Because we have to recognize, and we do recognize, that there are things that, as Dr. King would say, am maladjusted to, that we can't, you know, racism or harm of others or dehumanization or disregard for people, those are sins, those are things.

that are not, those are not honorable ways of speaking of our faith. As soon as we say all of those people should be annihilated, then we've stepped off of, stepped out of our faith and into our human sinfulness, wanting everything to be the way we like it. But when we're attuned to the Spirit, I think each of us finds that place within our own hearts where we're willing to listen.

We're willing to hear something outside of our own experience and to be attentive to the movement of the spirit around us, to listen to how our words or others words are impacting other people. And then to see in other people that like us, the other person is trying to make his or her their way in this world and to have compassion and mercy because

you know, in the Hebrew scriptures that we are created in the image of God, we're right away, whoever the other person is, if we believe that God is the creator of all, then that means we're coming into a situation where we want to listen. We may not like another person, we may not like their choices, but we also recognize that they are offering to us an opportunity to see God with a new facet, a new understanding, to walk around

a little bit with a wider understanding. often, you know, this is used to as a clobber passage when it talks about God created them, male and female people will say, well, there's no other choice. Well, it's interesting that in nature, whether it's in animals with humans, that there are multiple ways that people are created that hermaphroditic, you know, and we've gone through language changes, so I apologize if that's a

Bishop DeDe (14:49.708)
I'm constantly learning when I did my master's in psychology, we really talked about how our self understanding and our physical bodies and how that goes together and how we can feel at odds with who we are in our physical bodies and dysphoric issues. But for all of us that we are called to honor the dignity of the other person and listen for the spirit, because maybe the spirit is moving us out of our comfort zone to realize that

know, non gendered ways of being are healthy ways of being. That non, you know, that something that's different from how we like it, maybe it's giving us an opportunity to expand our ability to be in relationship with God. I know that, you know, with, we know that gender, I've said before on this podcast, gender is very important to God and very important to us.

When you have magnolia trees that are male and female, right away I know that God, it's important to God that gender matters. And for us, gender matters, especially if we feel non-gendered and want to express our wholeness beyond just these binary limitations, literally. So I think listening to the spirit becomes.

more more complex the more we look at it. I think one of the reasons in our baptismal covenant it doesn't say this is who the Holy Spirit is with Jesus. Jesus born of Mary, this, this, this, this is very specific. The Holy Spirit is something with which we have to engage and discern with humility and with an openness to being who we are which is sinner saved by grace.

the Holy Spirit moves in us and there are times when the hairs on the back of our neck will come up and it's a good thing. And there's times when the hairs on the back of our neck come up and it's a negative or a bad thing where it's you need to leave this place because this isn't safe here or this is a healing wonderful place to be. And so those movements of the Spirit are not something we can put into a neat package. It's something we come to with an openness and a

Bishop DeDe (17:05.037)
where we have to literally be like the trees in the wind that move with the wind, move with the spirit and know that we're in a dance of the spirit, very much like the Trinitarian, that beautiful picture of the Trinity dancing together. I've gone in a very wide direction from what your question was, but I really see this as a whole movement, a whole piece where.

Adam Eichelberger (17:25.144)
You

Bishop DeDe (17:30.872)
I think one of the reasons we have hard time talking about it is we want to get so specific and we want to codify it down to 10 points to know God. And when you talk about the Holy Spirit, it's a relationship. And like any relationship, it's going to have dynamic movement in it. It's going to have a discernment in it. It's going to have a willingness to be wrong and a willingness to say, no, that's not right. It's a relationship.

Adam Eichelberger (18:01.327)
Absolutely. And I think one of the things that's been most beneficial for me is for a long time, I was given a like, like you said, binary, very dogmatic prescription for Christianity. And one of the things I was always told is that God is never changing, which in some ways is true. But when I hear this, and when I think about the nature of the Holy Spirit,

It gives it takes a lot of the pressure off of me to think about the fact that maybe God does change and not in a bad way, but maybe my understanding and my perception of God can change that it can become bigger and that when my understanding of God and when that identity of God becomes bigger, it makes the kingdom of God bigger. It stops narrowing it down.

Bishop DeDe (18:40.794)
Mm.

Bishop DeDe (18:52.506)
That's right.

Adam Eichelberger (18:54.937)
for me, I wanted to key in on something that you said right at the beginning of your first point. And it's an ugly word. And we have talked about it a little bit on this podcast. We've talked about, you did. Now, a lot of people will say it's an ugly word and it's the word sin. We talk about the forgiveness of sins in the baptismal covenant. we don't, sometimes Christians don't like to talk about sin because this is a big turnoff. It's not a great pitch.

Bishop DeDe (19:03.768)
I said an ugly word. Okay.

Bishop DeDe (19:11.45)
You're seeing.

Adam Eichelberger (19:24.397)
when you're talking to people about how to talk about God, how to talk about Jesus, talking about sin. I feel like sin is not like our bad behavior. It's not like when we stub our toe and we say a curse word or things like that. Can we talk about what we're talking about when we talk about the forgiveness of sins? And the reason this means a lot to me, Bishop, let me give you some context, is because for me,

Growing up as a Roman Catholic, the forgiveness of sins was laborious. It takes a lot of work for me to work through the things that I do that take me away from God. And I was talking with a priest and I said like, okay, so like, when do I go to confession? And he, and this is maybe, this is again, a topic for another podcast episode talking about how the church looks at that as a sacrament. But he said to me like, well,

We do it every Sunday when we go to church. I say, well, I know, but like in the Catholic church, you can pray and it forgives this thing called venial sins, but the mortal sins, but he said, no, no, no, we, it forgives sins. God forgives sins. So I wanted, and I was like, this feels much better for me. Like I feel this weight lifted off of me. What are we talking about in the baptismal covenant when we talk about the forgiveness of sins?

Bishop DeDe (20:44.248)
That is for another podcast in this way. I mean, we're at this point in the podcast, we're gonna have to save the whole answer for that. I think, listener, we will pick that up on the next podcast. I'm gonna give a short little, I'm gonna talk about though, talking about sin. And then we'll pick up, how do we talk about forgiveness of sins in the next podcast? Because it's just, it would be unfair to sort of try to even begin to unpack that. But let's talk about that word sin and what sinfulness is and the salvation of Jesus Christ. You know, God,

Sin is where we're from. It's the land we live in. Sin is greed is good. Sin is revenge is sweet. Sin is you gotta get yours before somebody gets it first. Sin is a Shaddenfroy. Sin is any time, anything that pulls us away from the divine love of God that is compassionate, merciful, the fruits of the spirit. If you wanna look up that passage of scripture, sin.

was used for a long time. And you can chart this. mean, first century Christians, second century Christians, there's a lot of movement in what was kind of the important thing of the day. And in some centuries, the important things of the day had nothing to do with what we actually get really concerned about. But since, really since Jonathan Edwards and Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God sermon that was so prolific in the 19th century,

really this idea of you are a sinner and you need to change your behavior and clean up or you're not going to be good enough for God really came into the four. This idea that you are a sinner and somebody needs to die for those sins and Jesus died for it. And listen to Megan Castellans, know, the theology for the rest of us talking about what saves us in soteriology. But for this conversation, when we're talking about sin and especially when we're speaking our faith and talking

about sin. To understand that really we can use other words if we feel more comfortable. We make mistakes, we're broken, we're flawed, we're not perfect. We are trying hard but we're not going to become perfect in the next day because the nature of who we are in this moment in this world is that we have lots of options and often we're going to pick the selfish

Bishop DeDe (23:06.041)
option that dehumanizes ourselves or others. We come from a place where it's just in the water. So sin isn't so much what we do as the condition in which we find ourselves. But then I also, I do think it's important as people of faith to recognize God's forgiveness for us is not so we can just do anything we want and say anything goes.

It doesn't matter what I do anymore, because sin's just where I'm from. God saved that, so I can just throw my hands up and say, I can be selfish and hateful and it's fine. No, because when we are focused on our brokenness or those things that keep us from God, it means that we are not experiencing the fullness of God in that moment. It means that that is keeping us from a more whole,

rich, wonderful way of living our lives. When we forgive others, then we experience forgiveness. When we stop that behavior of whether it's alcoholism, substance use disorder, watching too much TV, the hateful words we say, when we intentionally make the choice to change that behavior and align ourselves with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

we will experience something bigger, more whole, it will heal our souls. And so there's this dance between sinfulness is where we're from and sinfulness is a choice we make, because both are true, but we often just focus on the choice we make rather than recognizing that God's not that interested in our sinfulness anymore.

Jesus's death on the cross, the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs. We are coming into this conversation with all of that has been done. And now God's turning to us and saying, now that you have all of this, how about you align your life with the truth of Jesus? So instead of being hateful, we're forgiving. We work on our habits of our life and we cultivate holy habits in our life.

Bishop DeDe (25:30.582)
And we recognize that we have not been given the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. so even in the state we're in, we can make choices that bring us closer to the grace of God and the love of God. And we can invite others to be part of that in an invitational way. And so I would say how we talk about sin, I think it's important to talk about sin because we need to say that it is not OK to look at

another race or a person and see them as less than. I think it's really important that we cultivate our ability to see and difference God's diversity and just beautiful way of creating the world. That no daisy is alike, no snowflake is alike, all these things that are so simple and we know, but we kind of toss it out the window and say, yeah, but I want everybody to be like I am. And instead to say, you know, I'm not experiencing the fullness of God.

because I'm allowing sin to keep me from the promises that God has for me. So I would say how we need to talk about that needs to change. And so the next episode, we will get into this ongoing understanding of the Holy Spirit as this, if you want to look at scripture between now and then, the spirit that moved over the deep in creation. If you look at Pentecost fire, of course, we want to look at the tongues of flame in the fire of God.

And then the next episode we'll talk about how the Holy Spirit in forgiving us and being alive in us that this movement of the Spirit that infuses all of life around us, how we speak about God and the Holy Spirit. So I don't know, do we have any questions from listeners? I think we did not this week. So is that right?

Adam Eichelberger (27:23.972)
That's correct. No questions this week, but listeners, we always encourage you to submit your questions. So if you go to cnyepiscopal.org, you can click the podcast button and you can ask Bishop a question for her podcast or give us a topic, something you'd like us to talk about because we're always looking for things to talk about. So make sure you reach out.

Bishop DeDe (27:40.922)
Absolutely, because otherwise I'd just drone off. So listener, I now pass the baton to you. This is your opportunity, your opportunity to talk with others, to speak of your faith. Find a safe person with who you can talk about who do you believe the Holy Spirit to be. How have you experienced the Holy Spirit? In what ways do you feel the Holy Spirit? And when have you felt the Holy Spirit kind of

guide you or direct you. I invite you to be part of this conversation of speaking of faith and until next time, let's keep speaking and let's keep believing. Blessings to you and take good care.