This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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Bathed in the waters of baptism, you are placed in God's path of totality, a path he won for each and every one of us.
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
The seemingly small, the particular, the previously overlooked, magnifies in importance.
When we believe in Jesus as the true and better fulfillment of every promise made to Abraham, we, too, are counted as righteous in the same way that he was — by faith.
It would serve us well to embrace the beauty of our diversity within the unity of the body of Christ.
C.S. Lewis, Grief, and the Holiday Season
The following poem was written by Tanner Olson to accompany 1517’s 2023 Advent Resources, The Clothing of the King. Advent begins this Sunday.
Lewis takes us to the planets to satisfy our cravings for spiritual adventure, which, as he says, “sends our imaginations off the Earth,” in the first place.
God comes to us through the flesh and blood and spirit of Christ precisely where he promised to be manifest to us and for us.
Jesus cries on the cross for us. He suffers and cries and dies in our place. He is forsaken by his father so we don’t have to be.
Although Jesus bodily ascended and is hidden from our earthly eyes, he is not far off.
The drama of Scripture is about God renaming us by bringing us into his image-bearing family once again. And it would take “a name above all names” to accomplish it.