THE TABLE OF BEGINNING AGAIN

I stand before you today to confess my sins -- as a golfer. I must confess that I am often guilty, in a golfing sense, of sinfulness. The New Testament word for sin means literally, "missing the mark." When you swing a 44 inch club at great speed and try to hit a very small, round object it is not unusual to miss the mark. Even the best golfers miss, if only by a little. Follow Tiger Woods around a course and you will see him fail to hit the ball perfectly many times. In golf, as in life, "all sin and fall short."

One of the things I like about golf is that you get to start over again regularly. So you mess up on #1, OK, just go to the next tee and start again. Regularly you can begin again. You can leave the mishits behind and start over. In a full round of golf you have 18 second chances.

In life, also, we need opportunities to begin again. A song writer, Neil Morse, has put it well in the lyrics to "The Land of Beginning again."

I wish there was a way to start again.

Just blink and count to ten

In the land of beginning again,

Where no one knows the bad things that you've done.

The past is truly gone

In the land of beginning again.

One of the reasons I like having the Lord's Supper every Sunday is that it gives me the opportunity on a regular basis to leave behind the mishits and begin again. Paul spoke of "forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead" (Philippians 3:13). It is good, in golf, that the opportunity comes frequently. I would not want to play a par 40 hole instead of a par 4. There would be a lot of mishits before I could regroup and start again. Likewise, it is good that we can come frequently to the Lord's Table, acknowledge our mishits, confess our sins, find forgiveness and start the week with a clean slate.

We call this the Table of Remembrance but it could also be called The Table of Beginning Again. I know there are other means available to us to find forgiveness and renewal, but I like the idea that Jesus meets us here every week and says, "this is my body given for you; this is my blood of the covenant shed for the forgiveness of sins." God must have known that we would need a regular opportunity to begin again, and this is it.