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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Perhaps best known for his “wager,” Pascal is often associated with this curious argument for the existence of God and eternal blessedness.
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.
Today’s advice for the anxious and worried would have likely horrified Luther.
The following is an excerpt from “A Year of Grace: Collected Sermons of Advent through Pentecost” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2019).
In life, we make decisions, from the most basic to the most lasting, lacking specific knowledge about the outcome.
While most of his letters were written as semi-private counsel and consolation, some, like the “Letter to the Christians of Miltenburg” were written openly for public consumption.
For Luther, Jesus does something much better for those who grieve than simply identify with them: He brings suffering and evil to an end in His own death.
Throughout the centuries, “Inferno” has also played a large role in the development of Christianity, particularly in the Western Medieval church.
As usual, Luther took what he received and turned it inside-out, so that it shifted from a series of demands and became a bestowal of God’s gracious promise.
At the core of Luther’s advice is the proclamation that we are free to hand over our pain, our sin, and our inabilities to our Savior.
When orthodoxy becomes a Law, heterodoxy can feel like the Gospel.
He is significant, not as a founder of his own movement, but for setting the procrustean bed of the particularly American church with its dogmatizing yet broad ecumenical stances.