A Talk by Rev. Patrick Kennedy May 2009, summarized by Linda Finigan

“The Death and Resurrection of the Word in Human Beings: Easter & Pentecost”

What knowing Christ means – for us and for Him

The Christian Community exists because of a need in the world. There are two major streams in how the Bible is viewed today: the divinely inspired perfect world of God, espoused by many fundamental churches, vs. the academic view of the Bible as an amalgamation of stories, politics, errors, and agendas.

This is a new dimension in the planet’s story: for the first time, there is a portion of humanity that doesn’t believe in spiritual reality, only the material world. In the past, people might question which gods were true, which gods you sacrificed to, but the existence of the divine was not questioned.

This was the situation in Palestine at the time of Jesus when the Christ entered the earthly realm to bring healing life forces to overcome the forces of death. At the last supper, His divine self expanded to unite with the substances of bread and wine, an event inscribed into the earth (as is everything we do). Through the holy meal, Christ created a vessel through which His life forces can work. In the breaking of the bread, the Eucharist, we align with his “seal,” the seal imprinted in the earth.

The early gospel was Christ’s presence in the community through the telling of his story, the reenactment of the holy meal. In the fourth century AD, the church hierarchy argued over the “articles of faith,” choosing four books Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as The Canon. Thus began the intellectualization of Christianity, though the presence of Christ was still present in the Eucharist.

The next major transition in how the Bible was viewed took place at the time of Luther, when he took the revolutionary step of translating the sacred (Latin) into the secular (German), transferring the World from the liturgy to the people. For Luther, the new authority was not the Pope, but the Holy Book, the Word entering the vernacular.

After Luther’s time, came the debate over what really happens at the Eucharist, with some questioning the “smoke and mirrors,” the pagan magic of the Catholic Church. As an interesting aside, the origin of the phrase “hocus pocus” as something deceptive or a hoax was a cynical toying with the Latin for “This is my body.”

In the 1700’s, theologians undertook the historical quest for Jesus, questioning the miracles, arriving at a view of Jesus as a good man with an admirable moral philosophy, a trend that continued into the 19th century with “The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined” an 1835 book applying the scientific method to the Bible. In this view, the resurrection was a “happy ending” created by Jesus’ followers who were devastated by his arrest and murder. Today, we have the academic writings of UNC’s own Bart Ehrman, examining the contradictions of the Bible to arrive at the conclusion none of its contents can be trusted.

What would the experience of this human doubt be to the Christ? Patrick drew the analogy of being a guest at a dinner party where no one is interested in who you are, what you have to say, of not being acknowledged in any way by others, the invisible guest. Rudolf Steiner suggested that the 19th century souls with consciousness of only material existence created a dark sphere where the seeds of materialism extinguished Christ’s consciousness. He experienced a second crucifixion.

From this event in the spiritual world, the seeds of The Christian Community were created, for if there is a crucifixion a resurrection must follow, the resurrection of the Word. The Christian community is not based on doctrine. Christ is experienced as the creative force within human beings. What is creative activity? Sacrifice, freedom, offering.  How were the disciples able to recognize the Christ force at Pentecost? His nature was within them. Pentecost, Whitsun, is the moment when the disciples understood. They got it. The love of the universe entered their hearts. They had been blinded by their prior preconception, but at Whitsun, in fire, Golgotha radiated its true name. The disciples (meaning followers) became the Apostles (meaning The Sent).

To know Christ is to experience Christ in us. The founders of The Christian Community witnessed the rising sun and on that basis, they founded a movement based on the creative power of love in the world.