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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Today, by faith, we live free from condemnation, free from the fear of death, free from all slander the devil could whisper and scatter about us. In Him we have a new family, the family of the forgiven.
In this season of a global pandemic, Peter’s little letter is especially potent as he writes to sustain the hope born of Christ’s resurrection in scattered believers whose lives were marked by suffering.
So let’s go to dark Gethsemane. For there we see that even in his greatest moment of weakness, Jesus is our only source of strength. He drinks the cup of wrath so we can drink the cup of grace.
In the upper room, Jesus revealed himself as the Lord of the dirty business of life.
In all of the good or bad that may have come out of the current mess that the world is in due to coronavirus, I see at least one good thing happening. The daily social media feed has been full of pictures, quotes, and videos of ordinary people praising other ordinary people for just doing their job.
Grace is about God’s choice when we cannot by our own reason or strength choose Christ or come to Him.
The gospel promise is that God in Christ knows exactly what your temptations are and still bids you find protection from them in him.
When Luther's barber, Peter Beskendorf, asked him how to pray, Luther wrote him an open letter that has become a classic expression of the "when, how, and what" of prayer. It is as instructive today as when it was first penned it in 1535.
Sin will constantly break our hearts, but God's love in Christ Jesus will give us new hearts daily, in the abundance of his forgiving grace. This is love in its purest form, and he has overcome the world.
The devil is to be taken seriously, but we should also not give him more credit or more power than he has after being defanged by Christ’s resurrection.
Joseph was not the father of Jesus, but then again, he was. Jesus was the true offspring of the heavenly Father, but even the Son of God needed a daddy.
In the vortex of uncertainty and upheaval, what’s the best thing we can do? Seize the ordinary.