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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There’s some wild and untamed prayers in the psalms. But they’re fenced in by order, symmetry, predictability. They organize chaos. And they bring order and hope and stability to our chaotic lives.
Looking at our dining room table most days, you might think we were running a cartoon factory out of our house. Drawings. Everywhere.
God lit within these ashes the fire of a promise: whoever they touched, that person became clean.
Yes, how good it is for you to have enemies, for without them, when would you ever have the opportunity to fulfill, joyfully and willingly, the law of Christian love?
He finds the woman and the man in the Garden and fought back for the identity of His people.
In our time Christ has not left us bereft of unbroken signs of His promised return.
Christians are Christians not because of anything that they have done but because of everything Christ has done for them.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Richter scale, our friends over at Wikipedia define it as a 1930s invention that "is a base-10 logarithmic scale, which defines magnitude as the logarithm of the ratio of the amplitude of the seismic waves to an arbitrary, minor amplitude."
We shrink away from God’s godness and almightiness, and so shrink down our prayers. Perhaps it is a lack of faith. We don’t trust God to give what He himself has promised to give.
We can leave all the stuff of life behind, because our great treasure God flaunts before the world on Calvary.
A promise was made to my older brother roughly 50 years ago. He was just an infant and had no idea that this promise was being set upon him.
Today, if you look closely at my left eye, you’ll see one tiny speck of powder embedded in the whiteness.