Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
What is Spiritual Discipline Actually For?
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Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh is one of my favorite modern writers because, even though I have not really even begun to read all of his that is available in English, whenever I read something by him, I immediately feel a sense of hope in Jesus Christ. His transparency and peace are immediately accessible in all his writing. And since there is still soā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Shouldn't This Thing Just Work? An Intentional Christianity
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I get frustrated at machines sometimes, especially computerized machines. They do the most inexplicable things at times. When I was a stagehand, we called this IWF (Intermittent Weird Failure). IWF when I was a stagehand was eminently addressable—in most cases, we just switched out the offending part and went on with our lives. But I don’t always have that option out in the worldā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Fix Your Spiritual Life with This One Weird Trick
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I wanted to pass on one piece of wisdom that was given to me by more than one spiritual mentor: Go to bed on time. I know that may seem small and obvious, but I continually talk to people (and am a person!) who don’t get enough sleep. In some cases, there’s little that can be done about itāchildren, work, insomnia, etc. But inā¦
Nearly Orthodox
Practicing Loss
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Some Early Thoughts on Loss, Practice, and the Nativity Fast I’m amazed at how much work I do sitting at my computer. I run pretty much everything from my laptop. By the time I’m finished with catching up on paperwork for the kids, for our business, for my writing, my training clients, banking, what have youā my brain is mush. Right now, for example, my brain is mush. Sorry. But I cameā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Salvation Costs Nothing. And Everything.
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Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost / Thirteenth Sunday of Luke, November 27, 2016 Ephesians 2:4-10; Luke 16:19-31 Very Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Many people who are introduced to the Orthodox Church for the first time, especially if they come from a Protestant background, may be rubbedā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
No One Ever Gets the Problems He Can Handle
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Another bit of wisdom today from Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix: Where parents are willing to take responsibility for their own unworked-out relationships either with their own parents or with one another, children rarely develop serious symptoms. Symptoms in a child are most likely to develop in the areas of the parentās own traumatization whereā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Key to Growth is Not More Data
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Just a few quick thoughts for today from Edwin Friedman, whose works I’ve been getting to know over the past few years—all three from his work A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix: Even the United States Government Printing Office has pamphlets about āA Teenager in Your Houseā which, like āTermites in Your Basement,ā is designed to teach parentsā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
A Shakespearean Thanksgiving
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Since most Americans are relaxing at home today, I thought I would shift gears a bit and share a little humor with you. For several years now, I’ve been collecting quotes from the works of William Shakespeare that amuse me to misconstrue as being applicable to Thanksgiving. Here’s the full collection: Shakespeare’s militant vegetarian complaining about the other guests eating turkey for Thanksgiving: “Whyā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Is Orthodox Education Really Necessary?
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One of the things I’ve encountered among some Orthodox Christians in America is the idea that, since most Christians in history were basically illiterate—that’s one reason we have iconography, right?—then there really is not an urgency to teach people what we might think of as the “data” of the Orthodox faith. It’s enough to have a good piety, to be a good person, toā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Post-Evangelical? I Can't Do That.
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My post today for my 40 days of blogging is over at the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy blog. Here’s an excerpt: One of the things I’ve noticed in recent years is the growth of all kinds of “Post-_______” Christianity. By this I mean varieties of Christianity that are all generally within the Evangelical Protestant genre yet explicitly do not embrace any particular tradition. Typically, whatā¦
Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy
Why I Cannot Be a Post-Evangelical, Post-Denominational, etc., Christian
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One of the things I’ve noticed in recent years is the growth of all kinds of “Post-_______” Christianity. By this I mean varieties of Christianity that are all generally within the Evangelical Protestant genre yet explicitly do not embrace any particular tradition. Typically, what this looks like is something recognizably Evangelical yet with a potpourri of different doctrinal, worship and pastoral emphasesā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
We Are the Gift
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The feast we celebrate today in the Orthodox Church is the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, a feast based on attestation found in the ancient Protoevangelion of James. Many of my sermons on this feast have dwelt on dealing with the historicity of the feast, something I myself have struggled with. It is not difficult to believe that the Virgin Mary enteredā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Our Mission is to Be On a Mission
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Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost / Ninth Sunday of Luke, November 20, 2016 Galatians 6:11-18; Luke 12:16-21 Very Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Today we are wrapping up our five-week sermon series asking this question: What is our mission? The Gospel reading we hear today for theā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
By Faith, Not By Sight. But How?
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Included in the lectionary I read today is this short verse: For we walk by faith, not by sight. (II Corinthians 5:7) The context here is St. Paul’s larger discussion in II Corinthians 5 of our hope of the resurrection, but this verse often gets taken out of this context to be given as a general rule for spiritual life. Taking things out ofā¦
Nearly Orthodox
Rebel, rebel and all that...
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Key to Peace is Letting Go of Control
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For today’s entry, I wanted to share some excerpts from some of my reading lately. We’ve been doing a conversation-oriented class on acquiring the spirit of peace at St. Paul’s over the past several weeks, and this past Wednesday night included the discussion of letting go of the need to control others as engendering peace within our own souls. And one of the thingsā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Our Mission is to Serve a Higher Order
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Feast of St. John Chrysostom / Eighth Sunday of Luke, November 13, 2016 Hebrews 7:26-8:2; Luke 10:25-37 Very Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Today is the feast of the greatest preacher among all the saints of Christian historyāJohn Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, whose Divine Liturgy weā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Our Mission is to Act with Faith
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Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost / Seventh Sunday of Luke, November 6, 2016 Galatians 1:11-19; Luke 8:41-56 Very Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Today we hear from the Gospel about two healings performed by our Lord Jesus Christāthe healing of the woman with a flow of bloodā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Nativity and the Vindication of Creation
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During this Nativity fast / Advent season, I’ve decided to take up a challenge I’ve not done for over a year—40 days of blogging. So beginning today and continuing through Christmas Eve, I’ll be posting every day on this weblog (I still really dislike the word blog even though it’s well-established now). This will include sermons (yes, I know I’m a couple weeks behind!),ā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Unfriend Me If You Voted for Trump!
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Are you unfriending people who voted for Trump (or Clinton or someone else)? Ending friendships (online or otherwise) over political preference doesn’t make any sense to me. (And I’m speaking of friendships here, not following public figures.) At the very least, it is highly likely that all the horrible things that made you vote against your friend’s candidate are not the reasons why heā¦
Nearly Orthodox
Fire and Ash and Facebook
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You probably don’t want to be my Facebook friend, at least, not this week. I keep my Facebook “Author” Page focused on writing and cat memes and breaking news about donuts, but my personal page is just that. It’s personal. I like to keep that personal because these are the people I need to talk real to me when things are tough, and that’s hard to do with only social media asā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Our Mission Is To the Person in Front of Us
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Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost / Fifth Sunday of Luke, October 30, 2016 II Corinthians 11:31-33, 12:1-9; Luke 16:19-31 Very Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Today we continue to explore the theme weāre focusing on for several weeks: What is our mission? And with todayās Gospel fromā¦
Nearly Orthodox
Love and Prayer and Baseball
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It’s just a game. Sports are dumb. Baseball? Whatever. This is what I kept telling myself as I watched the Cubs play in the 7th game of the World Series. It’s just a game, and there’s always next year and people are starving in the world around us. This is what I kept saying in my head as I watched the Cubs play. Truth be told, I turned off the game justā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
"The Netflix for the Church" Just Called My Orthodox Church
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Since we do not have a parish secretary, I just fielded a marketing call from an online service that is billing itself as the “Netflix for the church.” (“Are you familiar with Netflix, sir?”) I asked who generates the media that they sell. A list of names was rattled off (Matt Chandler, Dave Ramsey, Andy Stanley, etc.), kind of a who’s who in popularā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Some things we just can't hear.
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I recently ran across someone online asking people what they wished someone had told them when they were young. There were a lot of interesting answers. Some were about trusting your parents more, while others were about trusting your parents less. One man said that his younger self should hear that he would regret not sticking with the piano. Another said that 99% ofā¦
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Our Mission is Not From Man But From God
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What is our mission? It is to preach the Gospel which does not come from man but from God.
Nearly Orthodox
Prove Your Humanity
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When I’ve been signed out of the WordPress site for too long, it sometimes asks me to fill in all the blanks again and then it wants me to “prove” my humanity by doing math. Personally, I don’t think math is a good test for proving my humanity. I’ve seen trick horses on television add two and two, you know. Not only that, I do all my math by computer and calculatorā¦
