sunset bern

If you would like to try listening to some german.. (or at least a swiss person speaking high-german which I think a a little softer on the ears.. kinda the “norn irsh” equivalent i suppose) then a good way to spend the time would be listening to Martin Bühlmann talking about “Perspektivenwechsel”. In german the word for impressed is “beeindruckt” stemming from “drucken” – to press, which i guess has had the same kinda etymological childhood as our own english “impressed”.. and in the case of this sermon.. it wasn’t not just a good performance or nice rhetoric, but actually impressing.. moulding.. shaping..

The other thing that I loved about hearing what Martin was saying that evening, was that it could have been any one of a load of different people that could have said it. Sure, they wouldn’t have used the same vocabulary.. but i think some of the same little echos would have been bouncing around in the room afterwards. Perhaps for ““How (Not) to Speak of God” fans it might have been a little about apophatic theology and the “hypernymous” .. perhaps for YWAM friends in Scotland or Switzerland its about “letting God out of the box”.. perhaps for some of our monk friends its about knowing that a liturgy takes a lifetime before you even begin to grasp the depths of the content of it.. perhaps..

(perhaps I should be less pretentious with repetitive perhapses..)