Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?
I will, with God’s help.
In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts to root us in the faith of the apostles.
The faith that Jesus taught his disciples and then sent them out as apostles to teach the rest of the world is the faith in which we must be anchored. To be rooted in the Good News of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we, like the early church, continue in that which has sustained the church throughout the centuries: we study what the apostles taught, in a program of ongoing formation throughout our earthly lives (and likely beyond!). We engage in fellowship with one another, encouraging and supporting one another along the journey of faith. On Sundays and feast days, we come together as the people of God to praise God and receive our Lord Jesus Christ in the breaking of the bread, the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. And we pray without ceasing, guided by the pattern of the Daily Office, the prayers of the Church structured throughout the day and the year to guide us through the Holy Scriptures and shape our lives in God’s prayer and praise.
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Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
I will, with God’s help.
In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of ongoing discernment and repentance.
God is good, and God is love. Evil is the negation of God’s love, which would seek to turn us against God and lead us to devalue and destroy God’s creation and use God’s beloved children as means and not ends. This portion of the baptismal covenant calls us to steadily discern where evil is at work in the world and to resist it, turning away from evil and embracing God’s love. When we find that we have become complacent with evil and fallen into sin, we are called to turn back to God. We are called to constant discernment in a cycle of varied depths to root out the evil with which we have become complicit. We have many opportunities to reflect on how sin has come into our lives and turned us away from love of God and love of neighbor: in the course of the prayers of confession in our daily prayers, in the confession prayers at mass on Sundays and feast days, in the special litanies that guide us in reflecting on sin in the liturgies for Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and in the sacrament of the reconciliation of a penitent in which we help and counsel, open our grief to a discreet and understanding priest to obtain help and counsel, absolution, and spiritual counsel and advice. This ongoing and varied process of discernment must be paired with a willingness to respond to its results: a readiness to repeatedly repent and make changes to our lives in response to that discernment.
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Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
I will, with God’s help.
In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of evangelism.
The Good News of God in Christ is so good indeed that if we really receive it, we cannot but share it. To keep it to ourselves would be to deny the content of the gospel, which is good in part because it is inherently for all people. Spreading the good news by word and by example are sometimes wrongly put in conflict with each other; the call here is clearly to both, not one or the other. Using our creativity to proclaim the Good News is distinctly a part of the transformation the baptismal covenant calls us to here: art, music, dance, theatre, poetry, story telling, activities, clothing, and the very patterns of our daily lives can all be employed to proclaim to the world the good news of God’s salvific and transformative love for all humankind. As in the subsequent portions of the baptismal covenant, the good effects these actions have on others are not irrelevant to the point (as a people oriented toward love, these good effects should very much be something for which we long), our calling to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ (and to seek and serve and love, and to strive for justice, peace, and dignity) are prescribed not only for their effect on the recipients of their actions, but because of the transformation inherent in participating in the acts themselves. We are called to proclaim the Good News for the sake of the hearer, yes, but also so that we are transformed into proclaimers of the Good News. It is important both that the job be done and that we be transformed by its doing.
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Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
I will, with God’s help.
In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of love and service.
The call to love neighbor as self is both universal and particular: no one is excluded from membership in the class of “neighbor”; no one’s needs are outside our mandate. And yet despite the breadth of neighborhood, at any moment, we respond to the particular needs of the particular neighbors whom we are at that time in the process of serving. Jesus promised that whatever we do to “the least of these who are members of his family” we do to Jesus. We thus have the opportunity to look for Jesus in the faces of all we meet, especially those most in need, and thus to encounter and serve Christ. This call to lives of service implores us to discern and attempt to meet the needs of those who suffer in body, mind, and spirit, and also to be transformed ourselves by the process of loving our neighbor as ourself. There is a tension in this portion of the baptismal covenant between a call to be active participants in discerning the face of Christ in all those we meet and a response in love to our neighbors that effectively meets their needs. While some degree of specialization can help us more effectively respond in love to the needs of those requiring help, part of the sanctification generated by this portion of the baptismal covenant comes from discerning Christ in the faces of those we meet, suggesting that everyone needs some front line exposure to those in need.
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Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? I will, with God’s help.
In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of struggle for justice, peace, and dignity.
We are called to strive: to act; to struggle ceaselessly for a world that is just, a world that is peaceful, a world that respects the dignity of every human being. This struggle is prescribed for our transformation whether or not we expect we can in our lifetimes actually transform the world itself. Whether we can create the world we long for or not, we are enjoined to continue the struggle, because to give it up would alienate us from the kingdom of heaven, our eventual destination in which justice, peace, and dignity prevail. The vocation to strive for justice, peace, and dignity both complements and contrasts with the call to love neighbor as self. While the fourth portion of the covenant calls for us to effectively minister to the specific needs of our specific neighbors we encounter, the fifth calls for an orientation toward a struggle for justice and peace. In this process, it is the struggle itself for justice and peace, and not the effective obtainment thereof, that suffices to fill the human heart. The fifth portion of the covenant prescribes a faithful striving toward points on the horizon that are justice, peace, and dignity, whether or not we arrive there. The fourth portion of the covenant fills us with compassion for all of our neighbors; the fifth sets our hearts on the eventual arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven.
