Sun. May 18, 2008 (Gay Lynn Voth)

Gay Lynn Voth used scripture as her sermon notes, asking us to feel that God is meeting us through the text. She is currently working on a Ph.D. dissertation to review writers of Constructive Theology (late 19th Century through the present): theology that fits the problems of our time. She encouraged us to remember that any given passage of scripture can have a completely different meaning to us depending on what we are ready to hear on that particular day. Gay Lynn challenged us to think of the text of the Bible as "God-speech" because it is divinely inspired and the Holy Spirit helps us to understand and apply it. Such messages from God are "constructed" in our minds by the scriptures through the stories that are recorded about how God has acted in the past. She contrasted science with aesthetics as the alternative perspectives that we can have when we approach the text. We are called to be witnesses to the manifold works of God, especially his work through Christ (forgiveness and ressurrection). God used his sovereignty to give us the freedom to either focus on the corruption of the fallen creation or to give praise for the message of Christ to all nations ("I love you"). Jesus fulfilled both the Hebrew sacrificial system and the Greek virtue system. Gay Lynn suggested that both aesthetics and science fail to explain the mystery of the Trinity; the resurrection of Christ marked the beginning of a new time. [KJH] Listen to the sermon audio MP3 recording from Sunday May 18th using your browser's preferred media player.