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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Don't lose hope. Don't avoid church on Sunday morning.
Our value and our values, our life, our everything is from Jesus Christ given to us as a gift.
There is only one antidote to the venom of sin and death: the Savior who becomes the serpent so that every snake-bitten-sinner might live.
Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
The worship service is less like servants entering the throne room to wait on the king’s needs and more like a father joining his family around the dining room table.
Because of Jesus, God always hears our prayers, and he always responds to them in love–regardless of the quality or quantity of the one speaking them.
This week, we are grateful to publish a series of sermons from our beloved late Chaplain, Ron Hodel. This is the fourth installment of that series.
Our God is the one who brings back the exile, who restores the outcast, he is the one who devises means to do so.
If you want something empty, the tomb is the way to go. The point of the manger is that Jesus was in it. The point of the cross is that Jesus was on it.
Just as the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, so we, through the working of the Holy Spirit, recognize our Lord in the Word and Sacraments.
We worry about the fact our days are as grass – so we try to scratch out a place for ourselves, to make a permanent, lasting place, to climb to higher places and succeed, more often than not, only to hurt each other in the process.
Make no mistake, sinners are in fact being pursued by a most hideous beast called sin, death, and the devil, unleashed and striking continuously.