The women at the tomb were surprised by Easter. Amazed and filled with wonder at Jesus' Easter eucatastrophe. And so are we.
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.

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This is an excerpt from the prologue of “On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service” by Mike Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023).
Past, present, and future are tied together in Christ.
My fear of this coming darkness only lasts a moment.
We don't make Church "happen." Only Christ can do so. It's his happening.
The hardest thing you and I will ever be called to do is to believe that it is done already, that it really and truly is finished.
When I finished this book, I loved the Bible, and the Bible’s author, even more. And I can’t imagine a better endorsement than that.
There is a revival, no less real and even more definitive, taking place in every church, every weekend, where God’s people gather around his gifts.
Reading includes, on some level, striving. Hearing, on the other hand, remains passive.
We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
God has the power to take that which is small, that which is overlooked, that which is despised, and use it to create something wonderful.
I hope your people expect and even demand this of you. But how we proclaim the central message, that can (and probably should) vary.
I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.