The Baptismal Covenant: Part 5 - Resisting Evil

This episode of Speaking of Faith, Bishop DeDe and Adam continue their journey through the Baptismal Covenant, exploring the bidding concerning evil, sin, repentance, and the lifelong path toward holiness. They talk about what it really means to persevere in resisting evil, the power of repentance as transformation—not guilt—and the importance of community in our spiritual growth. This thoughtful conversation invites listeners to approach faith with curiosity, humility, and hope, trusting in God’s help as we walk the journey together.

Highlights:

• The Baptismal Covenant as a promise that shapes our lives
• Defining evil as anything that draws us away from God
• Repentance as a change of heart and mind
• Persevering in faith through struggle and failure
• Holiness as love expressed in relationship
• The essential role of community and God’s grace in spiritual growth

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 (00:02.136)
Hey friends, welcome to the podcast, Speaking of Faith. In this space, welcome to a safe space to think about what's most important to you and to an opportunity to practice and think about and prepare for having conversations about what matters most in our lives. I am DeDe Duncan-Probe. I'm the Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. I'm joined by Adam Eichelberger, who is our Director of Communications.

And we're gonna be talking about our faith today. This is an invitational podcast. This is not meant to be the answer to all answers. This is not meant to be the fount of all wisdom. This is meant to create a space in our world of curiosity and humility, something we don't encounter much right now, where we bring our curiosity and our questioning minds and really think about and ponder what matters to us, what is important to us.

And how are those things that are important to us manifest in our living lives, in the reality of our day-to-day lives? Often our faith is separate from how we function in the world. And so this purpose of this podcast is bring that back together and to more and more to speak about and engage with the things we believe and matter most to us. Now we've been talking about the baptismal covenant.

In the Episcopal Church, this is a foundational covenant promise, sacrament we make with God. Think of marriage vows as a covenant or something that we're promising to be about. In previous podcasts, we've begun the journey through the baptismal covenant. I invite you to look it up, to read about it. It is available online and in various places, especially in our Book of Common Prayer.

So we've talked about who it is we're covenanting with, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. We talked about, we continue in the Apostles' teaching, and what that means, was last week's podcast. This week's podcast gets a little deeper, and actually kind of, I think this podcast is where there's a definite turn in intensity. The heat's turned up here, the volume's turned up, because this is the bidding for this week.

Bishop DeDe (02:26.71)
Will you persevere in resisting evil and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? And we respond, I will with God's help. I really appreciate and I'm always drawn to persevere in resisting evil. Doesn't assume we won't do it at all. Doesn't say stop doing it. Doesn't say never do it.

It says persevere to never give up, never, never, never give up in resisting evil. And so right away, I want to ask what is evil and what do you think of as evil in your life? And often we'll talk about, you know, people who've lived in the past or those people or that situation or this thing, but I'm really wanting to focus in on the intimacy of our lives. What's evil in our own realm?

And when I think of it that way, and I think for all of us, when we think about resisting evil, to persevere in that, to think about what draws us away from God. Now, if you want a very deep theological expository understanding of evil, I encourage you to do some reading and some looking, the Can and Meghan's podcast, and there's a lot of good books out there to talk about what does evil mean.

theologically and in our culture and thinking. But for today, the definition that I want us to sort of have some curiosity about is to think of evil as those things that take us away from God, those things that keep us from living as God's people, those things that hinder our ability to love our neighbors, ourselves, that

that infect us and are a disease that harms us. So often we can think something and think, well, I really believe that truth is a virtue. But if we stop and think, so how often today have we lied? Then we suddenly realize, well, so I think something's good, but I'm doing something that's harmful. And I'm not actually living in harmony with my

Bishop DeDe (04:52.354)
better truth. And so when we talk about evil being something that pulls us away from God, I start thinking of things that we don't really think of as evil right off. Like, I actually think that believing we're completely right about things is evil. It keeps us from, take a pause. I think that, that

thinking we're right about everything, being a know-it-all, is really an evil in our world. If you think about what you see on TV and talking heads and things that are happening, you'll see people who have no curiosity about the other person, aren't listening at all to the other person, and are absolutely convinced that they're right. Now sometimes, if it's someone who we can say may be right, okay.

But most of the time people feel very entitled to be right about things they have no idea about. You know, I recall, and this has been a long time ago, but there was a person who said to me, well, I think that the American economy, and they had all these opinions about the American economy, and this was not an economist. This was somebody who I don't think had really ever read a book on an economy. And I just thought, wow, to have that,

just certain opinion that you know it all keeps you from understanding more deeply anything else. So when it comes to our spiritual faith to think we know it all, we're supplanting God with ourselves. We've lost our curiosity. We've started to step aside God, you may want me to do this, but I like this.

And as soon as that starts happening, we start down a path that takes us away from the promises of God, takes us away from who we're called to be. Other evils in your lives, and you may have several that you think of, but what keeps you from loving God? Self-doubt, too much time on TV or social media, things that pull us away from God. Allowing ourselves to be infected with fear.

Bishop DeDe (07:14.178)
And whenever fear is our modus operandi, whenever we're making decisions out of fear, we are participating in something that is not godly. Because God calls us to love and power and a sound mind, not to fearful living and anxiety. And anxiety is a real thing. So I don't want in any way to get confused here. I'm not talking about fears that are good fears.

I it's good to be afraid to jump off of a building, you know, not to have height, you know, but to understand that there are things that can harm us and to not do those things. That's good. I'm talking about fear when we're afraid of the stranger, when we're afraid of doing something that has a risk to it that we believe in, where we feel called to something, but we're too afraid to try it. Things that keep us from God's love and

and God's grace are things that hinder our ability to be God's people fully realized. So to persevere in resisting evil means that we check ourselves and we kind of say, okay, where am I kind of getting infected with a way of thinking that may not be God's way of thinking? Another evil is to think that whatever we're comfortable with, God's comfortable with. And I don't know about you listener, but

Most the time when I'm really called to something, I have lot of fear and anxiety about it because I have to rely on God and not on my self-sufficiency. I will with God's help is a statement of wholeness and healthiness because it means I'm not all seeing all powerful and omnipotent, God is. So I need God's power to do, to be holy. I need the source of all holiness.

to heal me and redeem me and to be part of holiness. Evil can be attitudes that we have. Evil can be things we ascribe to that are harmful to other people. And sometimes evil can even be when we think we're trying to help someone, but we've stopped seeing them as a human being and have started seeing them as a problem to be solved, an issue to be redeemed. And when we start dehumanizing one another,

Bishop DeDe (09:40.482)
we really have stepped off onto ground that is evil. And then I want to make sure that we hear all of this in the reality of what it is. Evil is not an individual choice. That's why we persevere in resisting it. Evil is things in the world that it's the soup we are in. It's the ocean we swim in. It is around us.

you know, greed is good. Revenge is sweet. We can go through a lot of platitudes, all of which pull us away from God. Greed is actually something God hates. one of the sins. It's not good. It corrupts us. Selfishness corrupts us. My way or the highway corrupts us. Anytime we are asserting ourselves over God's ways, then we are getting

We're not resisting evil at that point. We were getting sucked into it. And why is this important? Because we're people of God and we're making a covenant with God to be about what God wants us to be about. And there are things that just aren't good for us. There are things that just don't build up our lives in healthy ways. So with God's help, we're going to persevere, not give up, keep resisting evil. And then in the second part of this,

to look at this and say, you persevere in resisting evil? whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord. I love the language, don't you? When you fall into sin. Because I think when we sin, most of the time it is a fall, it's not necessarily a jump. We think, oh, we leapt into it. No, we usually fall into it. We're going along, we think we're doing the thing, and then we suddenly go, oh, I'm complicit in this.

ocean around me that's pulling us away from holy living. I, you know, I'm looking at other people as expendable instead of God's beloved. I have fallen into thinking that I can do this when actually it keeps me from my prayer life or it keeps me from being who God's calling me to be. We need God's help. And so when we turn back to God, that word repent, which I'm really big on,

Bishop DeDe (12:02.86)
because it was used so badly for so long. It was repent because you're not good enough for God to go get cleaned up and then you can come back. To repent is to change our mind. And sometimes, and I've had this happen and you may too, listener, where you think you believe something and then you learn more and you think, you know what, I've been wrong about this. I need to change. This is not okay. I need to do something different. I want to be.

who God is calling me to be. I wanna be in relationship with God. So this is a big conversation. It's probably not the most, you know, a lot of times people don't really wanna talk about evil. They wanna pretend that, well, there's things that are bad, but they're not exactly evil. And people struggle with this because...

Sin is fun. We like, we actually like being greedy. know, selfishness comes easily to us. Hating people, we kind of get into that. And I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, you didn't say you hated anyone, you weren't supposed to. And now people are just throwing it around everywhere. We need God. Clearly, it's not working. And so it is time that we change our mind.

and return to the ways of God to repent is what that means and to resist evil. And when we fall into evil, intentional or not, that we return to God and seek a new way. Now that's a lot. I have to say this bidding I think takes a lot of unpacking because there's a lot of detritus that's left over from other times. Adam, I'm going to welcome you into this conversation because we're speaking of this, we're talking together.

What stands out, when you think of this bidding, what's resonant for you?

Adam Eichelberger (13:54.776)
One of the first things that really stands out to me when I'm taking a look at the baptismal covenant, specifically in like in this bidding that we're given, is this is a, this is really hard for me to swallow because so much of my own upbringing in the faith is you are always good and always holy and then you're doing these bad things and separating yourself from God. And it's like you talked about a minute ago, like you got to get right.

Bishop DeDe (14:03.854)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (14:24.441)
And one of the things that's been really life-giving to me as I really have had a chance to dive into the baptismal covenant is it's kind of flipping this on its head and saying like, listen, God knows you and God knows that you're going to make mistakes, that you're going to stray and that you have this desire to come back. And he's really being welcoming. You know, like there's this, there's this

Bishop DeDe (14:35.086)
Mm-mm.

Bishop DeDe (14:40.373)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (14:50.178)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (14:52.503)
horrible dichotomy I lived in for so long, which is like, you're bad, get yourself together. But then also God is the loving father and he's waiting on the porch for the prodigal son or daughter or child, you know? so the first thing that really kind of stands out to me is the question I have in the covenant, it doesn't say if we fall into sin, but it's like you said, it says, but when we do whenever we do and it, and it, and it speaks to me, it says that failure is a part of the journey. So

Bishop DeDe (15:02.371)
Right.

Bishop DeDe (15:21.036)
yes, yeah.

Adam Eichelberger (15:22.637)
I guess the question I have is like, how can we learn to see that failing and falling short is a part of our spiritual growth? And not only that's a part of it, but that it's normal.

Bishop DeDe (15:36.042)
Well, my goodness, such a good question. And I'm so glad that you are taking this that way. Listener, as you hear that and you hear Adam talking about it, answer that in your own kind of in your own words. How would you respond to this? How would you say that? Because yes, the one of the baptismal covenant is such a gift to us because in this particular case that it assumes we're going to blow it.

It's not saying there's this idealized perfection and we should be trying to attain to that. I think when we really fall short, we're the only people surprised. God's not sitting there going, you blew it? my gosh. can't believe it. Where did you, you know, I'm so shocked, which I think in and of itself is indicative of our sinful nature. mean, the fact that we're surprised we blow it when we blow it sometimes is surprising, but what you're saying about when.

Adam Eichelberger (16:15.353)
I'm so shocked. I'm so surprised.

Bishop DeDe (16:33.454)
Um, and wait, the rest of your question, I got really caught up in that because I love that, you know, that God isn't surprised.

Adam Eichelberger (16:38.359)
No, that it is an inevitability and it's kind of turning on its head what God really thinks about us. That like, you you've talked about it before that quote, sinners in the hands of an angry God, you know what I mean? And that that's not how God looks at us, but we will fail and that's a part of our journey. And how do we learn to see failure and falling short as a part of our spiritual growth? That this is almost

Bishop DeDe (16:43.022)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (16:46.606)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (16:52.162)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-mm.

Adam Eichelberger (17:05.805)
And not to excuse sin per se, but that this is more normal than we realize.

Bishop DeDe (17:12.75)
Absolutely. you know that failure is an option here. And I think when we cultivate humility and we lay down all the toxic ways we think of things where there's good people and bad people, there's this and there's that. We're in a postmodern world where kind of everything has become a little bit gray. There's good and bad in all things. And we're more aware of that.

Adam Eichelberger (17:31.437)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (17:40.482)
But then what starts happening is we just kind of become, you know, we throw our hands up and say, well, well, there's no good in the world and everything's just, you know, convoluted. The thing about our faith that calls us back is that that isn't the final word. Yes, we're going to blow it. And if we just sort of throw our hands up and say, well, then anything goes and it doesn't matter and just sin boldly because God's going to forgive you in a way. who cares? Well,

The incarnation of Jesus Christ is inviting us to way of living that has benefit in and of itself. It's not about whether you go to heaven anymore. It's not about whether you reach perfection. It's about having peace in your life, having wholeness, having a sense of safety and security in the midst of an unsafe and insecure world. Living the Christian life is not about playing it safe.

It's about something beyond that. And so when we fail, it's not the final word. And that isn't really an issue. The issue is to keep trying and to get up and to recognize that every morning God's promises are new. And that as we seek to love our neighbor as ourself, which is for, we humans don't do that well. We say it all the time. We talk about it all the time. And I've said this on the podcast.

I've had more than one person say to me, I tried loving my neighbor as myself, but it just didn't work. And what I started saying to people is no, it really didn't because when you're loving so that you can get, then you're not loving. When you're loving to prove you're right, it's not loving. When you're loving to coerce someone into being like you want them to be, that's not loving.

And so when we fall into that, when we fail, then we try again, because when we have those moments and there's not, there's few of them, but when we have those moments where we genuinely love another person, we feel loved, we feel healed. It's, it courses through us. It's a moment of transcendence. It's just beautiful. That is worth repenting for. It is worth trying.

Bishop DeDe (20:02.848)
It is worth working for to live a life where we're drawn more closely to peace and mercy and grace and love and made more whole. And it is a journey. And so we will fail, but the point is not our failing. The point is redemption, forgiveness, and resurrection. And so when we fail, we start again. And there's such freedom in saying, I don't know.

When I was growing up, if a teacher asked me a question and I said, I don't know, it was seen as failure. You should know, you're supposed to study this, you're supposed to know these things. But to be able to say to big things, you know, I don't know, but I want to find out, I want to have curiosity. Because I'm so tired of trying to be something I'm not. Of trying to attain perfection when we're just not perfect. Of trying to pretend that we're

all that in a bag of chips when we're really not. And to allow God to be God is freedom. The truth does set us free. We're sinners saved by God's grace. We are not God. And so sometimes that means we can fight with God and say, I don't like this being this way. This person shouldn't have died or that shouldn't have happened. We don't like this thing that's happening in our world. And then we can...

set it down and receive that in the midst of the most difficult, challenging, dark moments of our lives, the love and mercy of God meets us there and is always, always, always bringing us into resurrection, always renewing us, always starting again. And there's freedom in that, but not a freedom to do what we want, an invitation to be part of something bigger than us.

Adam Eichelberger (21:54.924)
Absolutely. And it's not a it's not an invitation to be reckless. You know, it's it's a it's an invitation to mindfulness. Actually, it's a chance for us to really be aware of how we are living and being in our world and that we don't get to just go out and be laissez faire with how we act and behave and treat folks. Good.

Bishop DeDe (21:58.411)
No, no.

Yeah.

Bishop DeDe (22:19.266)
Well, and I was going to say, you know, right now, there's with Christian nationalism, it's a confusing time to be a Christian, I think. Not that there's ever been a, you know, peaceful, clear time, but right now with Christian nationalism, this sin of this is that people want to say that, you know, America is a Christian nation and that Jesus died for America to be great. And I'm not trying to say a partisan thing, although it does tend to lean that way.

Adam Eichelberger (22:25.485)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (22:48.622)
I'm about Jesus and Jesus came for the redemption of the world, not for a nation. The kingdom of God is not a human nation. The kingdom of God is transcendent and big and huge and glorious and beyond us. And when we cheapen it down to something that is mortal, we're one, that's a sin because we're not seeing God for God's expansiveness.

But then too, we're missing out on understanding that God's bigger than this moment, bigger than one thing. And Christian nationalism is not an America only thing. It's alive in many countries. mean, England, you've got lots of nations to pick from that are all talking about being Christian. And our faith is something bigger than that.

And when we keep allowing ourselves to small, you know, make small God to many, many sides, God, we're gonna miss out on the huge transcendence of God, the awe inspiring magnificence of who God is and God's salvation for us. But go ahead, you were gonna say something else.

Adam Eichelberger (24:08.683)
No, this is an again, listener, we have talked on this podcast about how when we have these conversations, I get to blindside Bishop a little bit with my thoughts. She doesn't she doesn't get a precursor or warning about the things I'm going to ask her. And right. And so I'm going to preface what I'm going to say here with if I wanted to ask you, Bishop, because this I think is giving us a really good

Bishop DeDe (24:18.282)
Yeah.

Bishop DeDe (24:23.136)
Otherwise it's not speaking of faith people. mean, then it's just preparing for faith, but go ahead.

Adam Eichelberger (24:38.765)
kind of 30,000 foot look or definition of what we consider evil to be. And we talked about what evil looks like in this time. And we've talked about that in the podcast before, but I also wanted to ask, let's turn the topic around a little bit about 180 degrees. we have this definition of evil, but then what does holiness look like in our time? And listener, I encourage you, this will be a part of this conversation, but also we did a whole episode about what it means to be holy.

Bishop DeDe (24:43.608)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (25:08.11)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (25:08.121)
And that's season three, episode 29. If those of you who are playing, if you're playing along at home, you can go back and check that out. But in the light of the baptismal covenant, I think, now that we have this, we've set the table for what evil is and how we resist it. What does holiness look like in light of this proclamation that we make in the baptismal covenant?

Bishop DeDe (25:11.402)
Ooh, look at that.

Bishop DeDe (25:21.87)
Mm.

Bishop DeDe (25:31.63)
Wow, that's such a good question. And I do, I'm really glad you brought up a previous episode because yes, go back and listen that one because it'll be more expansive than this answer or response. You know, when I look at the beginning part of the baptismal covenant with God, the Father, creator of all, and Jesus, born in this way, human and yet divine, and the Holy Spirit who's building community and healing and redeeming us, this movement toward relationship.

is holy. And we are great at breaking relationships. Clearly, look around us. We're breaking them left, right, and center. We've allowed opinions to be more important than people. And God is calling us into a divine relationship with all living things. The environment that we've harmed, the people in our lives. Holiness is

whole. It is together with God. And so God creates with joy and out of love. And for us to be part of holiness is to become part of creating with love. So back to the top of this podcast talking about when we make decisions out of fear, then we know that we're being inculcated with evil. We're going the wrong way. When we make decisions out of love, then we know that we're going

in the right direction, not that we're perfect or that we'll arrive there and that everything's gonna be fine, but that God is calling us into loving, healed relationships. And so what holiness looks like is Jesus for us, the Holy Spirit, God in the Hebrew scriptures, God who loves beyond all, who forgives and forgives and forgives, that

Jesus incarnates to us the holiness of God. And we are invited by Jesus to take up our cross and to incarnate Jesus to this world. So holiness are those things that point to God's own nature of relationship, love, mercy, and just eternal forgiveness. So that to me would be part of my definition. And again, not expansive.

Bishop DeDe (27:59.33)
But we're speaking of faith, which means that we aren't gonna get all of it in. That's part of the, this podcast is vulnerable because I would love to do some research and bring out, you know, like lots of academia stuff. But when we're speaking of faith, we're doing it with vulnerability and imitation. And we're all with humility seeking God and resisting evil. These words mean something. They aren't mastery.

their movements.

Adam Eichelberger (28:32.196)
So then I guess the last thing that we have that I wanted to ask with the little bit of time that we have left is how, and again, listener, this is meant to be a prompt for you and how you how this may apply in your own life. how do we help each other persevere when we talk about the word perseverance, when we feel like giving up? Because we've we've talked about this on this podcast before. There's a lot going on. And I think it's really easy to feel like giving up.

Bishop DeDe (28:50.766)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (28:57.42)
a lot going on.

Adam Eichelberger (29:01.45)
And you said at the top of the pot at the top of this episode that this is not just a singular thing or an individual thing that we do, but this is something we do communally. So how do we persevere as individuals and as commute, as parts of a community when we feel like giving up.

Bishop DeDe (29:19.906)
Wow.

So listener, I'm giving some space here because I know that you were thinking, how do I do that? What do I do? Sometimes, you know, the best way to persevere is to give up for a minute, is to sit down and stop doing, doing, and just feel what it feels like to want to give up, to be present to that in a real way, to say, you know, I am exhausted and I just don't like what's happening. I don't like what's going on.

So I'm gonna sit here in silence for a minute and allow myself to just be in God's presence and just be for a minute, to stop being a human doing and be a human being. And so to be for a moment. And then when I have had some space to be patient with myself and say, now, I'm gonna begin by hearing again the love that God has for me. And so maybe reading a passage of scripture.

listening to a favorite song, walking in the woods, getting some tree therapy, going out and feeling nature, spending time with our dog, to take those small but yet huge steps of reconnecting with what matters most in our life. And then when we're ready, to stand back up and say, okay, I'm gonna dust myself off, let the Holy Spirit dust me off a bit.

and start again and find a place where we can start. It may be a simple thing for some of us when we're really, really beat down. It may be as simple as listening to a song. It may take too much energy for that. Reaching out to a therapist or a spiritual director or a physician when we need to, to take care of ourselves physically, to eat something healthy, to go for a walk.

Bishop DeDe (31:19.906)
but just to do something that reconnects us with that hope of living that is in us. We always think that if we allow ourselves to feel how badly we feel, it will overwhelm us and we'll never recover. But in point of fact, that isn't actually true because the dark night of the soul will end and joy will come in the morning. And it may take a bit of time.

But if we allow ourselves to stop and to feel the reality and the truth of our lives, it will draw us back to God because at the core of us, we're created in God's image and nothing is ever lost in God's economy. And so I think we start over by believing ourselves that something is really hard. I don't think we start over by the way we normally do it. When we feel really beat down, like, well, go do something fun. And then we...

force ourselves to be chipper. And then the next day we fall down again. I think the way we really begin again is to stop and then start to reconnect with what we believe to be true. Well, friends, we have had a big conversation about evil. This has not been exhaustive in any way. This is an entry level beginning. And so I pass the baton to you. What does evil mean in your life? What's keeping you from the goodness of God?

How might you resist it and how might you persevere in resisting it? And in what ways do we need to lay something down in order to take up a more intentional relationship with God and one another? So until next time, let's speak of our faith. Let's learn together and have the humility and curiosity to seek God in all things. May you be blessed and be a blessing and I look forward to speaking with you soon. Take good care.