谎言与谣言 Lies and Rumours

Title: Lies and Rumours
Date:7 August 2022
Preacher: Rev Enoch Keong

We heard in the past few weeks sermons from Proverbs, where speakers shared on life skills to acquire; skills on listening and speaking, and in the area of illness and health and business ethics. They are good stuff and I hope we have tried out the tips and teachings in our daily lives.

Rather than life skills, I like to share with us something different this morning. We will do this by focusing on one of the authors in the book of Proverbs.

This author calls himself Agur. Not a familiar to us. Neither is Agur a familiar name to bible commentators. There are only 2 things scholars would confidently say about him, that he is a sage and that he is probably not an Israelite.

It is not really a problem for us not to know much about Agur the author. But allow me to say this, to not know what Agur says might just lead to problems in our journey in learning and applying the proverbs. Let’s read what he has to say, and I will explain what I mean by not knowing Agur’s words might give rise to problems.

Words of Agur, “7Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die: 8Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, 9lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.” (Pb 30:7-9)

These verses are words of prayer. Isn’t it strange to find a prayer in Proverbs? Proverbs is almost always about a senior person teaching a junior. The father or mother saying words of wisdom to the son. Up till this point in the book, we have never read anything about a man speaking to God. We have only read speeches spoken by man to man, seniors to juniors, and Lady Wisdom to humankind. But here we have a prayer, the first and only one in the entire book of Proverbs. Do we think this prayer is placed here for the sake of variety of genres or to perform some special function? Let’s find out.

Proverbs is a book written by multiple authors or sages (we call them). The aim of the book is to educate wisdom. And so we find in the book many wise sayings aiming to instill life skills, skills such as to listen with discernment, skills on how to live joyful and calm yet challenging lives. But the book of Proverbs does not jump straight to the sayings. Instead the author or authors begin by preparing the reader’s heart. Inject confidence; prepare the heart, before dispensing the saying to teach living life wisely. Therefore, we read time and again verses like these in the opening chapters: injecting confidence. “My son, keep my words and treasure up my commandments with you; keep my commandments and live…” (7:1-2).

Keep the word, treasure up the commandments, keep the commandments and one can expect to see things going well. The words of the sage communicate this sense of confidence, that we are able to do what the proverbs are saying, to keep the words and the commandments. One can also expect things going well when one does so.

I tend to think that the sage’s motivational talk actually works! Because when I talk to Christians, I sense that the confidence to be able to “do what the proverbs are saying” has been transferred and etched onto readers’ hearts. I meet Christian who are motivated and charged up to an extent that they are ready to do what the proverbs are saying. Take for example that Proverb 11:17 has captured our attention and fueled our imagination. This proverb reads, “A man who is kind benefits himself, but a cruel man hurts himself.” The confidence to be able to do what the proverb says would cause us to believe that we are able to show kindness, and what we perceive as kindness shall be decoded as kindness by the recipients.

In the area of truthful speech, we read proverbs such as, “Deceit is in the heart of those who devise evil, but those who plan peace have joy.” (12:20) and “For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases.” (26:20)“ Again we find that sense of confidence coming through, to be able to plan for peace and to put away gossips.

Agur disagrees that we should possess such confidence. So, he prays, “Remove far from me falsehood and lying…” The prayer is not to ask God to drive the liars and slanderers far far away from him, but to help he himself not to incline towards falsehood and telling lies. Falsehood encompasses gossip, insult, slander and rumor, Agur knows it’s human nature to say hurtful words, and he is calling to God for help not to do so. Agur, instead of a displaying confidence, projects profound humility through his prayer.

This prayer comes towards the end of Proverbs, after all the executable wise saying. We asked earlier on, is the prayer placed here for the sake of variety of genres or to perform some special function? The prayer throws in a necessary balance. We are to be motivated and to have enough confidence to do what the proverbs are saying. Yet at the same time, we are to do so, depending totally on divine grace and divine enablement. The book of Proverbs is at the end of the day not trying to produce wise man and women in action, but saints who depend on God to act wisely, in godly ways.

I am focusing so much on Agur’s prayer for a sermon on lies and rumors because the prayer connects us with reality and bring us to the right starting point. Connects with reality, what do I mean? Our tongue is not altogether in our control. We know right? James has some blasting words describing the tongue, “…no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” (James 3:8-9) Wouldn’t such a situation warrant putting less trust in our own willpower to speak truthfully and to call for divine helps?

And it is not just the tongue that can cause us problems; reality tells us that untruthful speeches are in themselves attractive. Although untruthful speech might invite angry faces and even destroy friendships, gossips and lies are also like our favorite food. The author of Proverbs is so sure that this is case that he wrote the same proverb twice!

I have a friend who was never a fan of baked bread till she was pregnant with a child. Pregnancy caused some changes to her body, and she told us that during those few months, whenever she passes by a bakery, she will just uncontrollably break into a smile! Gossips have this same attractiveness, this pulling power, this irresistibleness. Let me ask a question, who doesn’t enjoy hearing juicy stories? When we hear these stories, we response by saying, “is that true?!”, we may not rub salt and we may not do anything in respond but we like hearing those stories don’t we? Gossipers gossips and we will get to hear them, it may even be a daily affair in your schools or workplaces. What then? I suggest we guard our heart by coming to the right starting point and pray Agur’s prayer, “Remove far from me falsehood and lying…”

Speaking about guarding our hearts against falsehood, we all know to gossip is bad, but what if we big mouth because we are concerned about people? Because of the way the church is organized, church people easily fall into a kind of divulging out of a good heart. In the church there are many sub communities, ministries, fellowship groups and clichés. All these groups have semi permeable walls, openings where stories leaks and travels. I am sure we have had someone telling us the situation of someone else from another ministry or fellowship group, asking us to pray for that person. We do this because we want to see life led, going and feeling well in our church mates’ lives. We can legit do this because we are brother and sisters in Christ, and we have a Father God who hears and answers prayers. Not only so, a research recently published on CNA affirms the good sides of gossips. Gossips “can be associated with compassion, empathy and noticing suffering” and gossips can be “a way to represent the ‘problem behind the problem’” says the research. [1] I do think that we should continue to share and uphold each other in prayer, but it is also true that humans enjoy listening and sharing juicy stories. So when we go about sharing others’ concerns the next time, do pause and ask if our sharing will constitute an act of building the faith community or it is falsehood at work.

And with regard to falsehood at work, Proverbs cautions us in another direction on how falsehood may come about. Proverbs 25:8-10, reading from The Message this round to hear it in the modern context (The Message is Eugene Peterson’s translation of the bible).” Don’t jump to conclusions—there may be a perfectly good explanation for what you just saw. In the heat of an argument, don’t betray confidences; Word is sure to get around, and no one will trust you.”

In other words, if we confront someone with facts not properly verified, what we say may be untrue or half true and we may in turn be accused of gossiping or slandering. This warning might be more applicable for certain personality types and less so for others. But I suspect its applicability has only increased in recent times. Let ne read for us 2 paragraphs from an article published by CNA on 15 May 2022, entitled “Stress makes altruistic people become more selfish”:

“If you’re feeling stressed right now, you’re not alone. One quarter of Canadians report experiencing high levels of stress on most days and almost half of Canadians say their stress levels have increased since the pandemic began.

And unfortunately, stress affects how we treat the people around us – sadly, it’s often not in a good way. Being stressed can actually make people more egotistical and greedier.” [2]

Although the research is done in Canada, I still put it up even because situation in Singapore could not be better in comparison. Recent inflation would only have made people more stressed. When under stress, people become more egotistical, says the article. Stress also robs us of the time and bandwidth to check things in detail, stress makes us want to get to conclusions of things fast, which may in turn put us in situations that this Proverb is cautioning against.

Apart from the stressful environment, technology is also lending a helping hand to folks who gossip and attack others using words. There’s data collected to show that cyberbully continues to be on the rise. Instead of putting reputation at stake, “the internet lets people conceal themselves behind a mask of anonymity” [3] The consequence highlighted in the verses can even be avoided when practising falsehood these days. Human nature, environment, technology facilitate the practice of falsehood. If we think we are principled and strong, allow me to ask, are we stronger than Agur? Or we know, we do need to pray Agur’s prayer?

Agur fear not only falsehood, but also lying. Proverbs has 2 verses on the outcome of lying, “Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment.” (12:19), and “The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a fleeting vapor and a snare of death.” (21:6) It is not for sure that lying lips will lead to such outcomes, right? We have seen life going well and feeling well for people with lying lips.

Remember this picture of a paper tiger that I showed us 2 months ago? Here is another test case on whether we think Proverbs is nothing more than paper tiger. Lying is very a natural thing for human. We never teach children to lie. We are very upset when they tell lies but we are not that surprised when they do so. Because like it or not, lying is so very natural a thing for humans. And the scary outcomes mentions in the proverbs may be nothing more than just scarecrows. So, should we take the warnings in these proverbs seriously? Should we take my question on the PPT seriously? I guess these are not even the questions we have in minds. The questions we have might be, what if I only tell white lies? Will God forgive me telling small lies? Am I guessing correctly? We ask questions to justify telling certain lies, and we walk the tightrope.

Allow me to direct our attention to Agur for one last time this morning. Agur prays that God will remove far from him lying. We find his reason for doing so in the very next verse after the prayer, “Do not slander a servant to his master, lest he curse you, and you be held guilty.” What the verse is saying is this, do not bad mouth a servant who is powerless. A powerless servant can’t do anything to you when you wrong him. But he can cry out to God, he can ask God to be his vindicator, to avenge him, and the one who bad mouth him will be in trouble.

I hope Agur’s high alert on how easily man can falter and fall because of untruthful speech has helped us to reflect this morning on the way we use words. May it be that God hear from us, prayers of devotion, prayers for help like Agur’s. And not that he hears about us from others and be their avenger.

[1]https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/gossip-office-work-social-life-women-myth-2887626
[2]https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/stress-impact-altruism-more-selfish-brain-2683391
[3]https://www.comparitech.com/internet-providers/cyberbullying-statistics/

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