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The following is the text of the sermon given by The Right Reverend Clifton Daniel III, Interim Dean, on January 14, 2018. You can listen to the full audio on our sermons page.

Today I am going to talk about sin. Now this is not a popular sermon subject. Most sermons on this topic tend to put people to sleep. I ask your indulgence for a couple of minutes before you go to sleep. In fact, I’m going to talk about sin in a different way – I’m going to talk about sin as anesthesia. Let me tell you why.

When I was a teenager growing up in a town in North Carolina in the early 1960s, there was a civil rights march down the main street. So four of us got in a car and parked so we could watch the march in progress. We weren’t hostile. We just sat and watched the marchers go by. We could not for the life of us figure out what they were marching about. The world seemed fine to us. Of course it did, we were asleep to the realities faced by the people passing by in the march and to our own realities. We were unaware and indifferent to that stark pageant of segregation, patriarchy, oppression marching by and we were unaware of our own white privilege and sense of male superiority. From that perspective, the world looked pretty good to us. But morally, we were asleep, unaware to the world around us, anesthetized by sin.