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.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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Authentic proclamation, then, is the love of Christ for our souls, which we have seen and experienced through the under-shepherd’s pastoral care put into the words of Christ Himself.
The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.
The sermon takes place in the context of a multi-facetted set of relationships experienced through the weeks and months of being together in congregation and community. Those relationships shape the credibility of the preacher in the pulpit. 
Psalm 98, with its promise of a sea and mountains singing, takes these imposing natural features and turns them into a praise choir.
Despite our best efforts to avoid him, King Jesus remains very much unavoidable.
Christmas is a season of irony and song that helps us to know the sacred past and the truth of the Gospel of our salvation.
In whatever direction the bias of men might be, from thence he might recall them, and teach them of his own true Father, as he himself says: I came to save and to find that which was lost.
The more awareness we have that we are weak and low and frail and incapable of doing this thing called life, the more perfectly we are positioned to meet the God of grace.
When and how did the church start this season of anticipation?
All our sin and shame is answered for in the death and resurrection of our Lord.
Help comes for those who cannot help themselves. When we bottom-out and come to the end of ourselves, that is where hope springs.
For Christians, Advent is the time when the Church patiently prepares for the coming of the Great King, Jesus the Christ.