by Wes Avram. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005. ISBN 1587430886. Pb., 156 pp., $14.99.
In the first of the sermonic essays in this collection, Wes Avram recounts a story from a physician’s memoirs about a young man who lost his leg to bone cancer. The young man went through long and difficult therapy to learn to live without his leg. During his physical therapy, the doctor sometimes asked the young man to draw a picture of how he was feeling. On one occasion he drew a picture of a cracked vase, depicting his feeling of being broken right at the center of his being. As the years went on, the young man gradually accepted his new life and learned to find joy again. Much later, the doctor met the patient again, and had an opportunity to pull out of his files the old picture of the cracked vase. The former patient took the picture back and said, “This isn’t finished.” He added something to the drawing. “‘Now it’s complete,’ he said and turned it back to the doctor. He had drawn rays of light shining from inside the vase. He said, ‘Now I know that the crack is where the light shows through.'” [p. 31]
This entire book is a meditation on the truth of that picture. Here Presbyterian minister and Yale professor Wes Avram has gathered together twelve essays, all of which began as sermons, all of which direct the reader’s attention to the way knowledge of God comes to us in unexpected ways, through the cracks of our ordinary experience. Avram begins the collection with a reflection on how we know God, and he proposes that our knowledge of God is something that comes first to the senses–it is “God-sensed before God-known” [p. 9]. But these experiences of God-sensing are not available to be directly captured or controlled. They can only be received as gifts of grace (a claim that reveals Avram’s deep Reformed instincts). He calls us all to practice discernment, “God-sensual savvy,” to know these experiences of God rightly. Most of all, he calls us to pay attention.
Avram divides the main portion of the book into three sections corresponding to three realms where “God-sense” is promised: within the soul (“Sensing the Spirit), in the world, and in the church. In each, he offers four sermonic reflections that attend deeply to the particularity of God’s presence in events in Scripture and in daily life.
There are many gems here. “The Heartbeat of Hope,” from which the opening story comes, illumines the double nature of Christian hope, which yearns on the one hand for the remaking of the world as a place of justice and peace, and on the other hand affirms the truth that God is sovereign over creation. The reading of Job in “Only by Hearsay” emphasizes the transformation of Job through real encounter with God, one whom he had previously known “only by hearsay.” This essay sticks more closely to a particular biblical text than any of the other essays in the volume, and it produces a fresh, compelling call to life lived before God. The final offering, “Gifts that Work,” thinks with Romans 12 about the nature of gifts, and calls us to a new appreciation for true gift-giving without expectation of return, beyond the deadly reduction of gift-giving to a calculation in the “marketplace of purchased happiness” [118]. In the aftermath of the Christmas season, this last essay is particularly welcome.
The very structure of these essays can be jarring to the reader accustomed to single coherent narratives. Yet the structure itself makes Avram’s point: that it is in the juxtapositions, in the cracks between and within the sections of narrative that the light of God shines through. We cannot point directly to the light; we can only encounter it in the spaces between our busy constructions. It is in the cracks that we learn to recognize the works of the Spirit, who upsets our ordinary ways of perceiving.
Avram concludes his volume with an epilogue on preaching, offering up his own approach to homiletical theory for those who are interested. There he ventures this definition of preaching: “when enacted as a sermon, preaching is the liturgically situated, rhetorically disciplined, and passionately nonviolent witness to God’s presence in Christ, God’s love for the church and its people, and God’s passion for all creation (persons, world, and cosmos alike) as these things are attested to in Scripture, interpreted by the Holy Spirit, and borne by the traditions of the faithful. In this, preaching is God’s Word to a moment” [132]. Preachers will gain much from attending to Avram’s unpacking of that definition in the pages that follow.
This lovely, evocative book is a testimony to what Avram has seen and sensed of God in his life, in the world, and in the church. It is also a call to his readers to join him in awe and attentiveness to the ways God breaks into the world and shines light through the cracks of our existence.
Martha Moore-Keish is assistant professor of theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.
