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Good morning. Show business is renowned for superlatives and prizes. But there’s only one candidate on the shortlist for Most Embarrassing Moment in Oscar History. Surely everyone who woke up yesterday to hear of the debacle at the Academy Awards must have squirmed to imagine it: half-way through your well-crafted and heartfelt acceptance speech, you’re told that the prize should never have been handed to you. It’s a living nightmare. When something goes horribly wrong there’s usually two dimensions to the fallout. One we could call the hurt. On Sunday night the hurt was all-too obvious. The production team from La La Land experienced the agony of having the industry’s greatest prize first placed in their hands, then snatched away. The award-givers were made to look foolish and blundering. The producers of Moonlight lost their moment of glory in a storm of embarrassment and awkwardness. But there’s another dimension besides the hurt. If there were only the hurt, then every thoughtless remark or unkind gesture could be forgiven with an immediate heartfelt apology. But beyond the hurt, there’s also the damage. The damage is the permanent injury, the irreparable loss that can’t be set right simply by saying ‘Sorry.’ The damage of Sunday night is to all the professionals involved, whose careers may now be chiefly remembered for their innocent part in an unplanned farce. But beyond the Oscars there’s also damage to a hopeful spirit which trusts that, when someone says, ‘I’ve got good news for you,’ you can actually believe them. The deeper damage is to our waning confidence that we can tell truth from fiction. You can usually find a way to forgive hurt, but damage is a different matter. Damage, in whatever circumstances, needs an attempt, even if symbolic, at reparation. It requires recognition that healing, if it’s possible, will take a long time. It needs the perpetrator to say, ‘I realise your life won’t be the same again. Neither will mine be.’ The production team from La La Land showed immense composure in handing the trophy over to their rivals without the slightest resentment. How many of us, in the face of global humiliation and crushing disappointment, could have found such dignity? Life isn’t about advancing from glory to glory. We show our true colours in how we act when we’ve got something totally wrong, and when someone else has deliberately or accidentally inflicted hurt and damage on us. The central claim of Christianity is not just that in Christ, God forgives the hurt that we have so frequently done. It’s that in the Holy Spirit, God works daily to heal the damage that’s left behind when we think we’ve made our apologies. That’s when we see God’s true colours. The challenge of being human is to discover whether we can do the same.