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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I had been taught and believed in a God who is love, but as I walked outside that night I did not see him. I saw the stars and I felt their indifference.
Rather than validate our selfish, self-serving choices, he justifies us by giving us new life and baptizing us into his death and resurrection.
We confuse our success and failures with God’s judgment of us.
Did the suffering stop? No. It actually got worse. The commands of what exercise to do next sped up and intensified for both of us. The Guide was allowing himself to be smoked with me.
God is always better than your imaginings. God is greater than your thoughts about God!
Divine election is nothing other than God’s freedom and power to choose, and He has made His word the instrument by which He makes His choice about you.
When the church has gone astray, it has been the responsible (not slavish) approach to history that has helped correct the course.
I’d like to offer a short reflection on the theme of “worldliness” as it appears in his later work and how that’s connected to an item of his Lutheran heritage: the theology of the cross.
We’re messed up people with messed up bodies. All of us. Even Miss America gets hemorrhoids. The Fall mocks us in our own skin. We’re all walking sermons.
On Holy Trinity Sunday, God draws our attention, not to the inner workings of the Trinity, but the outer workings of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
They cannot know that I am already a father, but, this side of eternity, I won’t ever meet my child because of a miscarriage.
I'm having one of those days. You know, the kind where you're filled with confusion, guilt, and fear? If you don't know what I'm talking about, just stop reading now.