Wonderful World of Wisdom - When You Don't Know Nothin'

Preached on Sunday, August 26, 2018

Scriptures readings: Colossians 1:24-2:5; Proverbs 30:1-9; Luke 5:1-11

Dick and Jane's Spot, Ellensburg, WA
August 2018

There’s this guy who sounds like he’s beating himself up for how stupid he’s been. “I am the most ignorant of men. I do not have a man’s understanding.” (Proverbs 30:2)

Here’s a guy who feels really stupid. Well, that’s what I thought at first. I thought it was the bad things that make us feel small and clueless. Then again, there might be some huge, wonderful things that make us feel small and clueless.

The man who wrote the words we’ve read is someone named Agur son of Jakeh. The names here aren’t Hebrew names, but they come from a related language that was spoken by the descendants of Abraham’s second-class son Ishmael, who became the ancestor of the Arabs.

The story behind Abraham and Sarah and their treatment of Ishmael, and the ongoing influence of that bad treatment on the relationship between Israel and the Arabs is something that has come to endanger the peace of the whole world. They haven’t always fought each other, but it’s been a rough road for over three thousand years.

The wise man Agur and the publication of Proverbs takes us about seven hundred years into that long story: long enough for him to have earned a bad reputation with the wisdom school of Solomon. And yet there he is! There are a number of people, whose writings are in our Old Testament, who have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the story of the Bible.

The same is true with Job. The whole Book of Job is the story of one of the best people in the whole human race and one of the most beloved people of God who has nothing to do with God’s people, except that his story matters to God; and God wants to hold up to us these stories of people who lived beyond our horizon and still knew something good about our God, in spite of us and without our help. God has managed to get through to them on his own.

They are part of a world where God is at work in ways we don’t understand. God’s work in other people is beyond our knowledge and our understanding. Which is exactly one of the truths that Agur knows.

You could say that I’m wrong about this. After all, Agur confesses that he doesn’t know the Holy One. He says that doesn’t know God. But he also says that his level of understanding would test out to be subhuman. And that doesn’t seem to be true, and his words form an inspired part of our inspired Bible, so he knows more than he says.

Augur has a faith very much like the faith that the Lord taught to Job. Read chapter thirty-eight in Job and see how what the Lord (speaking through questions) reveals something to Job that sounds a lot like what the Lord has told Agur.

Agur knows that God strides back and forth between the dimensions that separate Heaven and Earth. God creates the atmospheres of the planets and makes their winds blow at the tipping of his hands. God gathers the waters in his cloak, and pours them into the seas. God has defined the ends, or the borders, of the worlds; and surely much more than that.

And those are just a few of the big things. That doesn’t count all the little things God can do.

In just a few verses, Agur the Arab can write a Hebrew poem as good as anything in the Bible. What Agur knows about God is beautiful and great. He knows that the Lord communicates perfect truth and he knows that you can count on that truth if you have any desire to walk with the Lord by faith.

Agur also knows that you can royally mess with the word of God. You can adulterate or contaminate it. He calls this “adding to the words of God.”

We need to take notice of when and where these words were written. Most of the Old Testament was not written at this time. What was already written down was probably not assembled into single scrolls yet. The words of God that Agur knew were the words he passed down to us in this chapter of Proverbs.

God’s words tell us that God can create heaven and earth, the spiritual and physical universe, and the particles and the underlaying fields of energy that are the foundation of everything we can see or detect. The ends of the earth could be like the limits of nature, and the laws of physics, that define how things happen; that define what can and what cannot happen. It’s simpler if we just say that God can do anything and that we can safely, securely live accordingly by faith.

God’s words tell us that his words, his communications to us, can be trusted because God values the truth and makes his words true in such a way that they are like a shield. The shield of God’s words is strong because God has made it from the most perfectly refined and forged metal possible. His words cannot be broken, or shattered, or pierced through to cut you.

Adding to God’s word doesn’t mean rewriting it to make it say something you want it to say. It doesn’t mean scribbling words in, or crossing words out. You don’t need to do any of that in order to add to it, or subtract from it, or just mess with it in general. All you have to do is to teach it messed up. All you have to do, in order to mess with the words of God, is to preach them all messed up.

I may have messed up Agur’s poem about “God Can Do Anything”. Maybe I shouldn’t say that the ends of the earth could be the laws of physics. That’s kind of a leap of the imagination; and maybe a leap of physics, too.

To explain something strange and mysterious in such a way as to make it more rational, or (even worse) to explain something away, is a dangerous game. Preachers and Sunday School teachers might be like children playing where they shouldn’t: like my mom’s two brothers, as kids, when they would compete at jumping off the roof of their garage. Of course, those were the good old days of childhood when parents seldom gave a thought to what their children were doing out of their sight.

Trying to change the meaning of God’s words, God’s messages to us, to suit ourselves, is what it means to add to the words. Making them not so weird, or scary, or threatening is adding to the words of God. Cherry picking them in order to make us look good or, at least, better than other people is the same as adding to the words of God. Making God’s words not mean what they say, or not say what they mean, is adding to God’s words. Those are the lies and the falsehoods that scare Agur.

Agur knows that God’s words tell us reliably what God can do, what God does for us. God’s words tell us who we are as we stand before God, and how to stay right and not forget the good news of God’s word.

Agur doesn’t want to mess with this, or get in the way. Agur sees himself in God’s words: how easy falsehood is and how it can come to cover God up and make him a different God. Agur sees that we can be tempted to worship a God of our own invention. He prays that God will deliver him from his own lies.

Agur sees that possessing too much can distract us from God and his word for us. Having too much can make us breakers of the truth: promoting ourselves and demoting God.

Having too little can make us desperate, always seeking our own advantage, and worrying about our survival, and forgetting to trust God, and actually stealing, and cheating, and lying to serve ourselves, because we don’t trust that God will give us our daily bread as we need it. Agur prays, like a Christian, for his daily bread, the right amount of anything, as God knows we need it to be.

But Agur prays because he knows great things about God.

If he makes this prayer because he doesn’t trust what God has said, and because he’s afraid, then I don’t know what to do with this prayer. I believe that he prays this way because he loves God so much that he doesn’t want to fail. He knows that God won’t fail him, but he wants the help that only God can design and give to make sure that this poor ignorant believer doesn’t fall short of the love of God.

Agur says he has no knowledge of the Holy One. Knowledge, in the world of the Old Testament, means a deep level of experience. It implies intimacy with the facts, the truth, the message. In some strange way Agur says that he has no knowledge of the Holy One, and yet the very next thing he says is a poem dedicated to the knowledge that the Holy One has given to him.

The dynamic of what we see in Agur is that he possesses no wisdom, but God’s wisdom possesses him. Agur has no knowledge, but God’s self-knowledge has opened his eyes.

There are a lot of experiences that can make us say something like: “I am the most ignorant of men.” “I am the most ignorant of women.”

Something terrible could make us say this. You could lose your job, and seem to fail at finding another. You could be hit by loss or grief: the loss of a home in a flood or fire, the loss of a precious human life that is so much a part of you that you don’t know how you might still be your true self without them.

You could find yourself in the path of an accident, or an illness, or a disability, or the threat of cancer, and the uncertainty of health and life that this brings. You could be hit by a mistake or a failure of your own, or make a horrible discovery about yourself that never occurred to you until now.

It happens. You say: “I don’t know anything.” Then, again, maybe that’s not true. Maybe a word crept in long ago. It was a word of something beautiful waiting for you: something that gave you strength, and courage, and hope, and energy. Maybe the gifts in your life seemed so great and strong that you forgot that word, that message, from God: that God can do anything and make anything possible. Maybe the poverty you feel now makes it hard to hold onto what you once knew, or makes it seem hollow and far away.

Yet there can be a quiet word that tells you that you are in God’s hands. It may be true that you aren’t holding onto God’s wisdom and intimacy, but God is God, and God is holding you in his hands.

Agur was afraid of speaking falsehood, but he was also afraid of hearing it from others. Agur had heard the same message. He had received the same truth that Job heard.

There were others who knew what Agur might have felt slipping away. The wise thing to do would be to find someone who has gone through what you are going through, only that person has not forgotten or lost the perfect shield that nothing can break.

Then, again there can be experiences that aren’t terrible at all, and these can also make you feel as though you didn’t know anything.

I think being in love can make you feel wonderful and scared at the same time and also feel as though you don’t know anything. Absolutely anything might happen. There was this one girl (or woman rather) who I thought might be the one for me, and one really good point in my favor was that her parents loved me.

Well, this girl could be a tomboy and go hiking with me in the woods and cliffs of the Oregon coast, all dressed down in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Another time I took her out to a dinner theater in the county seat. She fixed herself up and she was gorgeous, and there was a friend of mine and his wife at the same dinner theater and, when they saw us together, they broke into great big grins. My friend gave me a wink, and I felt so proud and giddy at what I was doing and who I had with me. But I moved too slow and she met someone else.

In spite of this, I know something about something wonderful making me not know anything.

I know guys who report that they became serious about their relationship with Jesus when they first held their babies in their arms. They knew that they didn’t know anything, anymore, and that they needed lots of help and strength from someone else in order to become what that child of theirs needed.

Love, parenthood, the work of your dreams, a home of your own designing, a talent that comes to life: These can open your heart to words of wisdom and good news.

It’s like Peter in our gospel story. He met a man, a teacher, a man about whom people were reporting a lot of crazy stuff, a man with callouses on his hands and maybe some stray sawdust on his tunic, like a carpenter. This stranger walked up to Peter and commandeered Peter’s boat, to use as a pulpit.

Then this stranger named Jesus told Peter where the good fishing could be found, as if he were a fisherman too. Peter grumbled and then he got a word from the Lord in the form of his biggest catch ever.

Peter didn’t know anything anymore. He knew that Jesus had done something, but he didn’t know how or why. He realized that he had made a huge mistake. He had misjudged someone who knew far more that he did. Peter had scoffed at someone who could seemingly do anything. This Jesus could do anything where Peter couldn’t do anything. Jesus was like the power and truth that Agur had known.

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid. From now on you’ll be catching men. You will fish for people.” Peter and his partners left everything and followed Jesus. Something wonderful made Simon Peter feel very small, and stupid, and clueless, and he never felt better in his life. It’s not a bad change. I recommend it to you.

Peter and his partners would come to feel the same way, sort of, when Jesus died on the cross. That was a bad thing. Now, again, they didn’t know anything anymore. That was a bad change.

Then, they were wrong again. They didn’t know anything all over again, when Jesus rose from the dead. They never felt better in their lives. And that’s not a bad change. I highly recommend it to you.

There is someone who can do anything. He can create a world, and he can save that world, and he does, and he has. What Agur knew was the wisdom that knew more than he did. In Jesus we meet the very wisdom of God in the flesh.

We may feel like we don’t know anything. We may feel like we can’t do anything. Jesus is God’s word and our shield, when our littleness comes from terrible things. Jesus is God’s word and our shield when our littleness comes from his wonderful gifts.