Wilda C. Gafney offers a spiritual discipline for such reading in A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: A Multi-Gospel Single-Year Lectionary (New York: Church Publishing, 2021). My thanks to Deanna Smith for pointing me to this resource. 27. Rita Felski, Hooked:

For me, this book will always sound like a mix of Phoebe Bridgers, Erik Satie, and Sufjan Stevens’s marvelous meditations in Convocations.

Eternity bears the marks of our now.

As ever, always, forever, my deepest gratitude goes to Deanna: partner, friend, co-pilgrim. You met me when I was a boy; the man I’ve become bears all the fingerprints of your grace and love. We spend a lot of time together, and it’s still never enough. Your help and encouragement at the eleventh hour of this project made all the difference.

our habitualities and history sail into an eternal future with a God who makes all things new.

Indeed, if Christ’s resurrection is the firstfruits, we will arrive at the marriage supper of the Lamb with our scars.

Redemption, here, does not sweep away a past; rather, Christ’s redemption gathers up the broken fragments and makes something of them. The God who saves is a mosaic artist who takes the broken fragments of our history and does a new thing: he creates a work of art in which that history is reframed, reconfigured, taken up, and reworked such that the

God of our ancestors, God of our people, before whose face the human generations pass away: We thank you that in you we are kept safe forever, and that the broken fragments of our history are gathered up in the redeeming act of your dear Son, remembered in this holy sacrament of bread and wine. Help us to walk daily in the Communion of Saints,

We sing Maranatha! but we are not a panicked people. As the writer Marilynne Robinson once said, “Fear is not a Christian habit of mind.”41 That is not to condone apathy but rather to encourage hope, a way of laboring toward a future that arrives as a gift. This is rooted in a profound trust in a God who is a giver all the way down, a Creator whose