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The scripture reading of the evening is the Psalm numbered 32. I shall read it in its entirety. Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon

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me, my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. When I acknowledged my sin to thee and I did not hide my iniquity, I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. Then thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin. Therefore let everyone who is godly offer prayer to thee at a time of distress in the rush of great waters. They shall not reach him. Thou art a hiding place for me,

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thou preservest me from trouble, thou dost encompass me with deliverance. I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not keep with you. Many are the pangs of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds him who trusts in

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the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy all you upright in heart. And may God bless to us this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It has been observed by some that to a very significant degree the history of our time has been influenced by two upper rooms. The first of these rooms is in

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a flat above a dingy laundry in the Soho section of London. There's a kitchen table in the middle of the room. On it a broken teacup, a child's toy, some tattered manuscripts, some remains of the last meal eaten. At the table sits a man short of stature, black bushy beard, rather fierce countenance. His name is Karl Marx and he's writing a book entitled Das Kapital. The thesis

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of this book is that humanity has the capacity to save humanity and that if only the world will become communist then it will be revolutionized and saved. Now the other upper room is in one of the oldest cities on the face of the planet, Jerusalem. At its center there's also a table set for 13. Jesus is the host and after leading those assembled in a unique ceremony he utters

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words of incredible beauty and worth. These words Christians believes and the deeds of this man are alone what can save humanity. Here there is no suggestion that humanity can save itself. Here there is no idea that a revolution wrought by us can save anything. Rather there is the teaching that the love of God is humankind's only hope and that that hope cannot be experienced by any

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individual until the Spirit of God moving in that individual enables her or him to say the three most difficult words in all the world to say. Those three words, "I am wrong." You see sin is a sickness which we don't like to believe that we have. We are so anxious to protect our own innocence that we'll blame all the world before we'll blame ourselves. Have you ever had the

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experience of congratulating someone on some particularly gracious or generous thing that they have done? If you imply that it is their nature to be this way they accept the compliment with good grace but if you suggest that you see in them some development away from a previous selfishness to a greater generosity they won't take too kindly to your words. We don't like to

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think that there is that in us which is unattractive. Speak to some prisoner in a prison, tell him that he is there because of weak character or some other sin of his own and he will not listen to you but tell him instead that he is there because of the problems of the environment and the heredity which was his and he will very cheerfully accept your words. None of us like to

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admit our inadequacies. Some years ago there was a terrible railroad accident in New York, 50 people were killed and one of those who died was the railroad engineer who was trapped in the cab of his engine. His dying words, the last words he uttered as he held out a small yellow slip of paper, his dying words in the paper were these, "Take this, it will show that someone gave me the

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wrong orders." That's the cry of every one of us. In the face of the wrecks and the catastrophes when we're pinned down by our blunders and our mistakes and our unkindnesses we all want to be able to say that someone else gave us orders. Or to go to the writings of Antoine Saint-Exupery, he suggests that people are very much like a species of termite which commonly rolls itself

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in the mud and covers every chink and cranny in that mud until it is totally encased. No wind, no sand, no light of stars can penetrate and there wrapped tight in that security it lives out its life. People try to do that, try to separate themselves from the world. They ask the world no questions and they want no questions from the world. They, like that termite, have a tendency

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to dry up and harden because while it is true that they may not commit acts which are harmful to others, it is also true that they omit many acts that they could do which would be a blessing to others. So trying to pretend the world is not there and that we have no responsibility for it absolves us of nothing. And if these methods that I've mentioned to conceal our own sin fail, then

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of course there is one other. We can always develop a very easy view of God. I read a prayer. It's a prayer I think many people would pray today though they probably wouldn't use the words even though they fought the thoughts. The prayer goes like this, "Benevolent and easygoing Father, we have occasionally made errors in judgment. We have been badly influenced by our heredity and

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environment, but we have done the best we can under difficult circumstances. We have certainly lived up to the average of decency. We are normal. So deal lightly with our lapses. Be your own sweet self with regard to our imperfections, but be limitlessly tolerant as we expect you to be, and grant us to live harmless lives full of self-respect. Amen." It's a crude strategy but many there are

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who try it. We blame others, we fault our circumstances, we try to be indifferent to the world, or we make a God who is neither holy or just but rather endlessly forgiving. And all of this to avoid saying those three most difficult words to say, "I am wrong." Which brings us to this 32nd Psalm. This is one of the great penitential Psalms of the Scriptures. Scholars

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believe that it was written by David after his sinful experience with Bathsheba. You remember the story. Bathsheba is bathing one night on her roof. Now whether she does this deliberately to flaunt her beauty before the king, or whether she is altogether innocent, and he just happens to see her, we do not know. But in any case, his heart goes lustfully after her. He sends for her,

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summons her, seduces her, sleeps with her, and she becomes pregnant. Now it could not have been her husband because her husband Uriah at that time was off in the wars and David was going to be caught with this situation unless he could correct it. So he brought Uriah home on special leave, thought that Uriah would spend time with his wife, and that when the pregnancy became evident it

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would be believed to have been the child of Uriah and Bathsheba. But Uriah was a very noble sort. He would not take to himself the pleasures or comforts which his comrades in the arms did not have. So inasmuch as they could not be with their wives, he did not go in to be with Bathsheba. And that took away David's excuse. So he had Uriah killed, and then took Bathsheba to wife, and

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claimed the child as his own. That's always what happens with sin. It starts out with just a look over the balcony one night and then has a way of spreading in many uglinesses. Now later, after this whole experience is closed, David writes this 32nd Psalm. And at one point in the Psalm, he describes how he felt after the sin, but before he confessed it to God. This is what he writes,

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"When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. Day and night, God's hand was heavy upon me, and the stream of my life ran dry as a waterway withers in the summer." He was sick with his own sin, but he couldn't bring himself to say the three hardest words to say. Now tonight, we approach this holy table, and we're all intelligent enough to

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understand ourselves. We know the tragedy of much of our behavior. We know the unseemliness of our thoughts. We know the hardness of our words. We know our reticence to serve and our desire to have others serve us. It is important then that as we come to this table, we admit that while we know how to live, we don't live that way. We must here at least get rid of our great

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illusions and say with Augustine, who was at first a terrible sinner and later a mighty saint, "Prima intelligentia ut te nois peccatorum." The beginning of intelligence is to know yourself to be a sinner, to say the three words, "I am wrong." For we cannot be healed of our sin until we admit that we are sick. You know how it is when you try to deal with a child who has done something wrong but

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won't admit it. First you ask questions, and they say, "I don't know." And then they move on to direct denial, and finally they try to shift the blame to somebody else. You remember how we felt, we older ones, when the Nuremberg war trials were on in '45 and '46 and '47, and we saw those Nazis sit there with stone faces and say, "We are not guilty. We simply did that which we were commanded

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to do." Or more recently, do you remember the Watergate parade? When those men of excellent achievement in so many regards never did come to the place where they said, "I am wrong." Instead, they confessed only to having made errors in judgment. You can't help people who deny the truth about themselves. Here's a woman who's asked to examine herself, and she comes to the

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conclusion after examining herself that, well, she doesn't do anything that everybody else doesn't do. After all, her conduct is no different than theirs. A ministry of self-approval is an illegitimate priesthood. An illegitimate priesthood. Because, you see, it blurs the lines between good and evil, excusing one's conduct by the conduct of others until there

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are no more lines and nothing that distinguishes between the two. Some try to cover up their sins and avoid their confession by moving into the shelter of good works. In other words, they try to do nice things to balance the things which were not so nice. Acts of penance, you know, like the monks. You remember Mr. Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter? That scarlet

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letter with A, it stood for adultery, you remember? And it's told in the story how in his closet he had a bloody scourge, and he used to beat his back with that scourge, and he almost starved himself with fasting, but all the time he clung fast to that secret sin of adultery, counting on the good works, you see, to cancel out the bad ones. And some people, and this I think the worst of all,

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some people take the attitude, "Well, that's what Christ came for, to die for our sins, so let him do it, and I will go to him whenever I have need." That is to close a wound before the poison has been withdrawn. That is to look upon that which is unutterably solemn, lightly and casually and cheaply. Sunday school teachers said to me, "Students, what is repentance?" One little boy

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said, "Repentance is when you are sorry for your sins." A little girl raised her hand, "And what do you think repentance is?" "Repentance is when you are sorrowful enough for your sins to quit." That's the difference. But a lot of people will use methods like that to avoid saying those three words. And it was so with David. He admits it in the psalm. His whole body hurt, the hand of God

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was heavy upon him, his life was running dry. And then Nathan comes on the scene. Nathan, the prophet of God. You remember, he comes into the king's court. One word from David, and Nathan could lose his head. And Nathan tells a story. "Sire, there is a man who had many, many flocks. And near him lived a herdsman, a poor man who had but one lamb that he loved very much.

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And this man, who had so many flocks, entertained a guest one night in his tents. But instead of killing one of the many flocks that he had, instead of killing one of all the sheep that lined the hills and which were his, instead of taking one of those, he goes over and takes the one lamb that belonged to this one man, the lamb the man loved so much, and he killed it and

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offers it to his guest." What do you think about that, sire? And David says, "Bring him to me, he shall surely die." David, like us, you see, is much quicker at seeing the sins of others than he is his own. And then Nathan, his eyes alight with the fire of the Spirit of God moving in him, standing tall with that rough courage which comes from living in rough hills, with a voice that

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would rumble down valleys and make wild beasts cower, charges David. He points out, you see, that the one with many flocks was David himself, a whole harem in his palace from which he could draw any woman who suited his pleasure. And here Uriah with just one lamb, Bathsheba, he loved very much, and David takes this one instead of all those available to him. You can't get the

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drift of it in English. What David heard from the lips of Nathan were these words, "Atu haish, thou art the man." And faced with this, David confesses. He says the three words that are the hardest to say. It's recorded for us by him in the psalm, "I acknowledge my sin to thee, I did not hide my iniquity, I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and then thou didst

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forgive the guilt of my sin." He had to say, "I am wrong," before he could be healed. There had to be confession before there could be cleansing. It's the thing we've all learned to associate with Alcoholics Anonymous. You remember how those struggling ones who become part of that organization cannot be a part of that organization until they're willing to stand up and say, "I am

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an alcoholic." There has to be confession before there can be healing and power. It's the confession that leads to the cure. We all know the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. It never happened. Parson Weems made it up, a collection of little morality tales to guide America's youth. The story is false, but the lesson it teaches is true. It's when we say,

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"Father, I cannot tell a lie," that healing begins. You see, the fact is, my friends, we may forgive ourselves, but our nervous systems won't. Oh, there may be times of relief when we become involved in things and forget about those aspects of our lives that we don't want God or others to know, but eventually they creep again into our consciousness. They must be confessed

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completely. I heard just yesterday of a man who sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, it read, "I stole some money from you some time ago and I can't sleep, so I'm enclosing a check for $100. P.S. If I still can't sleep, I will send you the rest of what I stole." That's not the kind of confession that does it. David says full confession. His words in the Psalm are these,

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"Let everyone who is guilty offer prayer to thee. At a time of great distress, when the great waters rush about, they shall not reach such a one, for thou wilt be a hiding place for him. Thou wilt preserve him in times of trouble. Thou wilt encompass him and give him deliverance." David spells out in this Psalm the four things that God does with a sin that is confessed. First,

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he forgives it. That word means it's sent away. As far as the East is from the West, so far it is sent away. Or another biblical picture is that it's cast at the bottom of the sea. Another is that it is put behind God's back. The first thing he does with a sin is forgive. The second thing David says in the Psalm that God does with a confessed sin is to cover it. Sin is ugly. It's

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an abomination before God and before men, so he covers it, and he covers it with the blood of his own son. And the third thing he does is to not impute it to us. To impute is to keep score. What this means is that God keeps no book, or if there is such a book, he tears out the pages on which the mistakes appear and throws them away. In 1 Corinthians 13, God's Spirit says through Paul

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that true love keeps no score of wrongs. God, when sins are forgiven, keeps no score of wrongs. And then David says he removes from us guile. And guile is trying to be secret about your sins. And when you know that you've been forgiven, when you've confessed and have felt the power of that in-flooding freedom, well that opens you so that you don't sneak around in sin anymore. But openly

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tell him of it when it attacks you, and defeat it then and there. If we would do this, we would be like Augustine, whom I mentioned a few minutes ago. He was a great sinner. He's the one who prayed, "Lord, make me a Christian," but not yet. He involved himself in all kinds of sensual sins. He was very brilliant. He became the professor of eloquence at the University of Milan. And

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then one day he was sitting in a garden, and he heard a voice. He said it was like the voice of a little child saying, "Tole, lege, tole, lege, take up and read, take up and read." And there was a collection of the writings of Paul. And he picked it up, and he began to read. And the first words he read were these. Mind you, a riotous and debauching man, the first words he reads are these.

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"It is not in rioting or in drunkenness. It is not in wantonness. Make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof." And struck by this word, Augustine comes clean before God, pours it all out, then goes and pours it all out to his mother Monica, who had been praying for him for years. He comes clean, and God makes him a great saint. And at the end of his life, many

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years later, when he was dying in his small room in North Africa, he had written upon the walls of his room the words of this 32nd Psalm and of some of the other penitential psalms. What Augustine was saying to all of us was what David says in this psalm and what the Spirit is saying to our hearts tonight. We must face our sins. We will either face them here, saying, "I am sorry," and

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be forgiven of them. Or the time will come when the bread of life is gone, that our sins will face us before the judgment bar of God. We must face our sins here or there. There's no other way. So as you come to his table tonight, I ask you to remember the words of King Solomon, David's son. Solomon, thinking back on his father's sin and his father's confession and

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his father's forgiveness, writes these words, "He who controls his transgressions and conceals them will not prosper. But he who confesses and forsakes them, he will obtain mercy." May God bless to you this simple witness in his name. Let us pray. Well, we have come to this table many times, and now we come again. Let no sin stand between us

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and the Savior. Let each and every one of us say in our heart of hearts, "I am wrong, and I am sorry." Let us claim the offered Savior and be forgiven forever and forever. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]