Matt Chandler - The Forgiveness of Sins

If you have your Bibles, grab them. Exodus 34 is where we’re going to camp out. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you. I always want you to see where I’m getting the things I’m saying; I’m not making them up out of thin air, but I’m really digging them out of the Word of God. As we move toward the end of our series on the Apostles' Creed, this is one of those weeks that I’ve been looking forward to. If I could, I would rather just sit in my living room and make an appeal for you to hear this message and press in some ways, trying to pull out of you some thoughts. I have deeply been in prayer about our time together and what God might accomplish as we consider the reality of the forgiveness of sins—both in regards to how God has forgiven us and how we, enabled and empowered by the Holy Spirit, are to forgive others.

But let me set up the dilemma before we solve it. In 2013, Justine Sacco, I believe is how you pronounce her name, was a 30-year-old senior director of corporate communications at IAC. IAC is a leading Internet media corporation; if you’ve ever been to ask.com or used Urban Spoon, IAC owns those two platforms. She was on her way home to South Africa around the holiday season in 2013 and began tweeting to a couple of hundred people who followed her—really silly tweets about the indignities of travel. If you’ve traveled a lot, especially internationally, she began to lament some of those indignities. On her flight from New York to London, right before takeoff, she tweeted that there was a German man who smelled and that she was lamenting having to be in First Class with this smelly man for the next 8 or 5-6 hours until she landed in London. When she landed in London, she tweeted, «Ah, good to be back in London, home of cucumber sandwiches and bad teeth. LOL.»

Right before her 11-hour flight took off from London to South Africa, she tweeted that she was heading to Africa, made a joke about AIDS, and then joked about how, in her whiteness, she wouldn’t get AIDS. Then she turned off her phone as the plane took off and went to sleep in First Class, living the dream. That tweet went viral, and by the time she landed in South Africa, her name and that tweet were the number one trending topic in the world. When she landed and turned on her phone, the first text she got was from an old high school friend she hadn’t talked to in years, saying, «I’m so sorry this is all happening to you.» She had no idea what that meant, and then her phone exploded.

As Justine got off that plane, her whole world was gone. She was fired from her job, and the hotels she had booked would not host her because their employees threatened to boycott if they housed her. Her life was threatened, and even her family and extended family members in South Africa, who had spent their lives working with Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, avidly supporting the cause to push back against the darkness of racism, were now engulfed by this enraged internet mob that ultimately destroyed Justine’s life.

I don’t want to make light of how foolish one must be to post something like that on the internet. I think what she said was foolish and idiotic, but I don’t know that it deserved death threats. I don’t think it warranted her having to move and hide for an extended period of her life, nor do I believe it justified the fallout with her family that occurred. One thing that stands out not just in Justine’s case but in dozens of others is that, although public shaming is no longer part of our justice system, the rule of the human heart persists. We love to see others get punished. We enjoy watching them being punished, and we want them to face consequences. In fact, we live in a day and age where outrage is all the rage; we are constantly looking for something to be furious about, and news outlets and individuals are eager to stoke that outrage.