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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Cyprian actually rejected the accusation that he believed in rebaptism because he considered only the baptism within the church to be a valid or true baptism.
The fact that baptism specifically unites me to Christ in his death means that I share in his sufferings in my identity, not in my activity.
This is an excerpt from the book, “Paul and the Resurrection” written by Joshua Pagán (1517 Publishing, 2020).
Jesus continues to breathe His gifts on His beloved. He continues to breathe absolution upon sinners like me and you, He continues to fill us with the Holy Spirit and all His comfort.
I rededicated my life as many times as I could when the guilt was unbearable. I would read my Bible more and pray more, yet I still struggled. I knew deep down, I was breaking God’s heart with my failure at being his child.
Both Hus and Luther arrived at the same conclusion: neither councils nor the pope had final authority in the church. Headship in the church belongs solely to Christ.
God created humanity in his image and then inhabited that image. Not just for 33 years, but for eternity thereafter.
By basing our assurance on the promises of God, which we not only hope for in the future but live in now, the Christian can finally rest in the comfort that they are both saved and not responsible for their own salvation.
The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
God's Word reveals the truth about us. We don't much care for God's Word. We prefer the yes and no of our personal taste buds.
The kingdom I seek is the lower-case realm ruled over by the almighty upper-case Me.