Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Consequence Happens

I was watching The Tonight Show last night and Jimmy Fallon had a joke about Ashley Madison getting hacked.  If you don't know what Ashley Madison is, that is probably a good thing.  It is a website specifically designed for adultery.

People can sign up for a fee like a dating site except that these are not single people. They are married people looking to cheat on their spouses with other married people.  The idea is that this would be more discreet and the unsuspecting spouse would have no idea about the extramarital activity.

Ashley Madison's tag line is "Life is short. Have an affair."
Der fliehende Liebhaber by A Buzzi,
19th Century

Evidently, this website dating service is the second largest among users online next to Match.com.  It is astonishing that over 37 million people that have signed up to use this website.

Now we see that the privacy that they guarantee may not be so private.  Hackers are threatening to release all of this personal data to the web which has 37 million people nervous right now.

When Fallon made the joke, he said that they had someone in the audience whose name came up on the list and they were going to out them on television.  Then the camera started surfing the crowd.  The interesting thing is how nervous some of them looked!  Fallon then admitted that they were teasing the crowd a little bit.

The whole industry is based upon the idea that if I don't get caught, there are no consequences.  It is a rather silly idea and we see from this news that there are always consequences.  If nothing else happens, at the very least, the anxiety level of a lot of people has risen today.

This Sunday, we will jump to the Old Testament for the lectionary reading for 2 Samuel 11:1-15.  This is the story of David and Bathsheba.  It is a story of a man who believed that he was beyond consequences but we see that this is not the case.

Infidelity is always a weakness.  It is not cute or trendy or fashionable.  It always has consequences even if it is just the loss of one's personal integrity.

But there is also redemption available and the past does not have to define us.

Life is short.  Join us for worship!


Photo by A. Buzzi [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

No comments:

Post a Comment