Once upon a time there was a man named Agur. It’s an unusual name. He was an unusual man. A little bit of his story is told in the book of Proverbs. He is famous for praying one of the very best prayers in the whole Bible. Oh wait, no. He’s not famous at all. He did indeed pray one of the Bible’s very best prayers: but most Christians have never heard of him.

We usually say that the book of Proverbs was written by King Solomon, in accordance with the title given in the first verse of the book: “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel.” But the book itself says that that’s not entirely true: in Proverbs 22 we suddenly get a section that attributes the following material to “Sayings of the Wise,” without any further information about who those wise ones might be. The last chapter of Proverbs says it comes from King Lemuel – or actually, that King Lemuel wrote it down, but he credits his mother as the source of the material. And chapter 30 is credited to this guy named Agur son of Jakeh. We know nothing whatsoever about Agur from anywhere else in the Bible, or from any other ancient writings.

And so everything we can glean about Agur’s story has to come from the words he said, recorded in this one chapter of the Bible.

If you read the entire chapter – it’s 33 verses long – you’ll see that Agur liked making lists. He includes four lists in the second half of his chapter: a list of things wonderful beyond understanding, a list of terrible things, a list of things that are small but wise, and a list of things that move with a stately stride. Hey look, I made a list, too: a list of Agur’s lists.

But 33 verses is too long to cover in one sermon. I encourage you to read the whole thing, maybe this afternoon when you get up from your nap. This morning we will focus on just the first 9 verses of the chapter.

1 The words of Agur son of Jakeh. An oracle.

Thus says the man: I am weary, O God,
    I am weary, O God. How can I prevail?
2 Surely I am too stupid to be human;
    I do not have human understanding.
3 I have not learned wisdom,
    nor have I knowledge of the holy ones.
4 Who has ascended to heaven and come down?
    Who has gathered the wind in the hollow of the hand?
Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment?
    Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is his name?
    And what is his son’s name?
    Surely you know!

5 Every word of God proves true;
    he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.
6 Do not add to his words,
    or else he will rebuke you, and you will be found a liar.

7 Two things I ask of you;
    do not deny them to me before I die:
8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
    give me neither poverty nor riches;
    feed me with the food that I need,
9 or I shall be full, and deny you,
    and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or I shall be poor, and steal,
    and profane the name of my God.

The first thing we might notice here is: our man Agur is tired. There’s no indication of how old he is: twenty? fifty? eighty? But he is tired. The way a twenty-something is weary is perhaps not the same as the way an eighty-something is weary: but Agur is so weary that he says it twice: “I am weary, O God; I am weary, O God.” And we want to see that he says it as a prayer. It isn’t always the case that when we are sighing with weariness, we intend it as a prayer, sharing with God the distress we are experiencing because life is wearing us down. But we pick up a clue about Agur’s life in how he expresses how very tired he is. And we pick up another clue in how he expresses it as a prayer.

And we should also notice his humility. He sees himself as just a guy, he doesn’t claim any special place for himself. And he’s forthright about how he has done something stupid. Maybe it’s one thoughtless thing, yesterday, and he’s still beating himself up about it. Maybe it’s lots of things, where he has blundered into some foolishness, and it bothers him that he’s still making the same mistakes he made back when he was a teenager. It’s like he’s lamenting, “I always get this same thing wrong. When am I going to learn not to mess up that way?” So we can’t tell for sure whether it’s one recent goof or the ongoing pattern of his life. But we can see that he writes a four-line poem about it:

Surely I am too stupid to be human;
    I do not have human understanding.
I have not learned wisdom,
    nor have I knowledge of the holy ones.

Now, what we’re about to see is that Agur does indeed have some very clear insight into the human condition, specifically about himself, and also as it applies to people more generally. But he doesn’t present that by saying, “Boy, am I smart! I’ve figured out something important, and you clowns would do well to pay attention and learn from me.” Instead, Agur describes himself as too stupid to be human. Which he’s not. If he were too stupid to be human, that would mean that everyone else is smarter than he is: but it turns out we’re all pretty stupid, some of the time. To be human is to reckon with the reality that we all do stupid things we wouldn’t have done if we were paying better attention. They say, “You can’t fix stupid,” but I think that isn’t quite right. Stupid and stubborn is pretty hard to fix, I’ll grant you that. But I’ve been stupid, more than a few times, and when it all blew up in my face, I somehow found the way to say, “That was really stupid. I wonder if I can be a little smarter next time.” I’d like to say that I’m much smarter than I used to be, but the evidence would suggest otherwise. What I can say, with real authority, is that there are many more ways of being stupid than I had first thought, and so far I’ve only tried out a fraction of them. It’s like, why keep making the same stupid mistakes when there are so many new and different stupid mistakes that you’ve never even tried?

In verse 4 Agur derides himself for all the theology he doesn’t know. How do we understand heaven and earth, wind and water, the ends of the earth? It’s all about God, sure, but after you’ve said that, what do you say next? What’s God’s name, God’s essence, God’s reality? And, intriguingly, what about God’s Son? Whoa. It’s way too early in Bible history for Agur to be asking about the Son of God, but there it is, right in the text: Agur said it, but he couldn’t understand it. And he mocked himself, saying with sarcasm, “Surely you know!” Yet he was aware that surely, he did not know. And Shirley speaks up from the corner of the sanctuary and says, “I don’t know, either.” And neither do all the rest of us. We have experiences, from time to time, of feeling the presence of God, sensing the prompting of the Holy Spirit, hearing the word of the Lord: but these are brief glimpses. They don’t count as the fullness of knowledge that we wish we had.

So Agur reflected on his thoughtless deeds and on his lack of spiritual understanding and said, “I am too stupid to be human,” and I want to reply, “Meh, cut yourself some slack, buddy. All of us humans are pretty stupid, just on different days.”

Next, verses 5-6, Agur pondered on the Bible. At the time he was writing, only about a third of the Bible had been written: but Agur reverenced these writings, and recognized them as the word of the Lord. He wrote:

Every word of God proves true;
    he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.
Do not add to his words,
    or else he will rebuke you, and you will be found a liar.

We can see in this that Agur discerned the difference between the word of God and human words claiming to come from God. In Old Testament times there were numerous itinerant prophets, some of whom ended up with their prophecies included in the Bible, and some who claimed, “Thus says the Lord!” and yet despite their loud proclamations, they turned out to be false prophets. It’s a stern warning that Agur offers: don’t claim more than you should about what God is saying. You may have an admonition, a sermon, a word of encouragement, a Sunday School lesson, to share with your neighbor or with the whole church: but you need to acknowledge that this is your intuition, your discernment. You must not pretend that you speak the infallible word of the Lord: you can offer your insight humbly, and not as if it is a brand new verse of scripture that everyone should bow down to.

And then Agur prays for two things. It is, as I said, one of the best prayers in the Bible. He asks with some intensity: Two things I ask of you; do not deny them to me before I die. Perhaps that indicates that he was ill when he wrote this, and what with the state of medicine in ancient times, he recognized that when people got as sick as he was, they often did not get better: so maybe he was not going to get better. Maybe he was going to die. On the other hand, he does not ask for God to heal him, so maybe it is not illness that moves him to phrase his prayer that way: maybe it is desperation in his soul. Maybe it is an urgent desire: O God, I really really want these two things. It feels like life and death to me. I’m asking with all my heart, Lord. Please don’t say No.

So what are the two things Agur longs for with such intensity?

Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
    give me neither poverty nor riches;
    feed me with the food that I need,
or I shall be full, and deny you,
    and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or I shall be poor, and steal,
    and profane the name of my God.

Since I’m claiming that this is one of the very best prayers in the Bible, let’s take a moment to analyze why that is. Agur’s prayer explicitly asks for two things. The first of these is his prayer for integrity. “Remove far from me falsehood and lying,” he prays. Sometimes, when the truth is painful, it’s easier to tell a lie. “Is your homework done?” “Yes, mom, I finished it all.” Many a student has told that lie. Not even meaning it as a lie: we intended to do our homework, to finish every bit of our homework: just not this moment. But still, the homework was not completed, but we lied and said it was.

Agur also recognizes that there are other ways we can be deceptive, without telling a direct lie. Like when someone asks you whether you were the one who did the bad thing, and you answer with shock and dismay: “I can’t believe you would suspect me of this!” You didn’t lie by saying the words, “I didn’t do it.” But without actually saying Yes or No, you gave the impression of denying it, seeking to convince the other person that you didn’t do it. Or it’s like when a reporter asks a politician whether he will vote in favor of an upcoming bill, and with a nod and a responsive face, the politician responds that this is such an important issue, and then he shifts to talking about something else. We’re left supposing that the politician’s nod might have been a positive answer to the reporter’s question, but actually it was carefully deceptive: the nod might just have been about the question’s importance, making you think he said Yes while he carefully avoided giving any direct answer at all.

When Agur prays, “Remove far from me falsehood and lying,” he is expressing his awareness that there’s more than one way to shade the truth, to deceive, to tell a lie without putting the lie directly into words. And he wants an integrity that results in clear, honest speech, telling the truth in word and action.

The second thing Agur asks for is a measured sense of “enough.” Neither poverty nor riches. There’s a saying that goes, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.” Beatrice Kaufman, literary writer and editor during the 1930s and ’40s, seems to have been the one who coined the phrase; many others have quoted it and sometimes been credited with it. It became the title of a book by Judith Resnick – the investment firm CEO, not the astronaut. Books about money always express how it’s better to have more of it.

And Agur might have agreed with this saying, because when you are in poverty, when you have no food to give your children, there is a terrible desperation to your life. But what Agur really believed was that both poverty and riches are dangerous. You need to have enough, he indicates, but you need to not have more than enough.

Jesus instructed us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” which is a prayer that makes sense when you wake up in the morning knowing that there is no food in the house: the pantry is empty, the fridge is empty, your stomach is empty: you pray for your daily bread because, at the moment, you have no bread. Will you find bread today? In first-century Israel, there were many who found themselves in this situation: day laborers, people who did not own their own farm or their own workshop. The haunting question was always, Will you find work today, and get paid today, so that you can buy some flour and oil and mix that with a little water to make a soft dough and shape it into small disks, and you’re gathered some sticks to build a fire on top of a flat rock, a fire that burns large enough and long enough to get that rock really hot, and then you sweep the coals off to the side with the stick you gathered but didn’t burn, and you place your dough disks on that hot hot rock, till they get brown on one side, and then you can flip them over with that stick. The heat of the rock boils the water in your dough into steam, so even though you don’t have any yeast or baking soda, your cake still comes out a little puffy. We could call it a pan cake, but maybe you no longer actually have a pan, maybe you used to have one but you sold it a month ago to buy flour, so now you’re cooking on the bare rock. There were many people in the time of Jesus who learned the Lord’s prayer, and when they prayed, “Give us this day our daily bread,” they really meant it: if God didn’t answer their prayer, they didn’t have any bread that day, and they and their children went hungry. Again.

But for many of us, when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” it isn’t like that, is it? We’ve got some money in the bank, we’ve got canned goods on the pantry shelf, we’ve got fresh food in the fridge and more in the freezer. It feels like an odd situation: we pray for our daily bread, but it doesn’t really matter to us whether or not God provides new bread for us today; we’ve got soup and veggies and noodles and meat and cheese, and we can buy plenty more at the grocery store.

Agur prays his prayer, and we can see that he doesn’t want to be poor: he doesn’t want to go hungry, he doesn’t want his children to go hungry. If he ends up in poverty, if he cannot feed his children: he’ll steal. He knows it’s wrong. He doesn’t want to steal: he wants always to have enough money to buy food for his children. He knows stealing is a sin. But he knows that his situation might turn out to be so desperate, that he will resort to stealing, in order to feed his children. He says it right out: stealing “will profane the name of my God.” He hates that idea. But if his children are going hungry, he will steal in order to get them food. So in his list of two things he desperately wants, the second one includes his prayer for enough.

But his second request also includes his prayer that he will not have too much. Isn’t that an astonishing prayer! If I have too much, I’ll come to the point where I don’t feel like I need God in my life. If I have too much, I’ll think that I’ve got everything covered; no need to pray “Give us this day our daily bread,” I’m self- sufficient when it comes to making sure the children are fed. I have a house that is solid and secure, I have barns full of grain; I’m working with an architect on a project to tear down the barns I have to build bigger ones, with more storage capacity. Agur realizes that if he has too much, he’ll be just another rich fool, the kind Jesus would tell a parable about.

Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy Disney, the brother of Walt Disney, wrote an article in The Atlantic (online edition, June 21, 2021), entitled “I Was Taught From a Young Age to Protect My Dynastic Wealth.” Here’s an excerpt:

“As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of calm, now you find that you can’t stop at six. Likewise, if you move up from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again.

“Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.”

To her credit, Abigail Disney recognized this problem, and is attempting to grapple with it. She expresses the same insight Agur had expressed close to three thousand years earlier. Lord, protect me from having too much: for if I have too much, I’ll think of all these luxuries as necessities, and I’ll think I must be such a very fine fellow because I have all this, and it will no longer matter to me if there are children in the neighborhood who are going hungry.

In 2000 Bruce Wilkinson published a book called The Prayer of Jabez, which offered a different perspective. It became a best-seller, highlighting Jabez’s prayer that God would enlarge his territory. The book advocates that people should pray the prayer of Jabez every day, asking for God’s blessing, that their territory would be enlarged: not necessarily that they would own more real estate, but that they would experience great prosperity. Greater and greater prosperity. The heart of Jabez’s prayer is remarkably self-centered: “O God, let me have all the territory. Let me have all the prosperity. Let me have all the blessings.”

But the prayer of Agur is different from that. I have said that it is one of the very best prayers in the Bible, and here is why: Agur doesn’t ask for all the blessings. He prays really hard, but he just asks for two blessings: integrity of word and action, and enough to take care of his family, neither too much nor too little. It is a prayer of great insight. Where Jabez prays to grow his material life, Agur prays to grow his spiritual life.

So today, you get to choose which one you want to pray: The prayer of Jabez, or the prayer of Agur. Choose wisely.