Blessed Discretion

"...."Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you this day to
meet me! Blessed be your discretion."

To put it mildly, discretion within the human community has fallen on hard times. We have become a people who live from expose to expose, and from indiscretion to indiscretion, as though the thing most to be valued is some twisted form of public honesty...or some strange equation of public humiliation with justice and truth...or some sick fascination with the wages of sin. But that is not all. For with discretion's demise, so also follows the preemption of occasions for redemption wherein this God of great discretion works to keep people, just like you and me, from falling any farther.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile, therefore, to remind ourselves, in its absence, what discretion actually looks like. According to Webster's New World, discretion may be defined, in the first place, as the "freedom or authority to make decisions and choices; power to judge or act." Use your own discretion, we counsel: free to do as we think best. To be sure, there is no lack of such discretion in this world, or in the disarmingly recognizable world inhabited by the likes of Nabal and Abigail and David. In fact, from Nabal's limited perspective, discretion was exactly what he meant to exercise in response to David's men. Most likely, ill-mannered Nabal believed himself authorized, by his very churlishness and at his discretion, to tell David's men where they might go with their master's hospitable request: "Who is David?" he asks incredulously. "Who is the son of Jesse? There are many servants nowadays who are breaking away from their masters. Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers, and give it to men who come from I do not know where?" From Nabal's perspective, he was exercising the discretion necessary to survive: the authority to make decisions...the power to judge...the perspicacity of all fools.

Of course, what appeared to Nabal as discretion was nothing less than a near fatal indiscretion on his part. With the very next verse, David commands his men to gird on their swords: "God do so to David and more also, if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to Nabal." So then, for the next moment, it would seem David, the shepherd boy anointed by the now dead Samuel to become King of Israel, David was the one with the freedom and authority to make decisions. David was the one with the power to judge and act. David was the one capable of exercising discretion in this complex little story.

But things are never as they seem, in the Bible, until they are seen from the perspective of the Lord, the God of Israel, a perspective which leads us to consider the truth of a contrary understanding of discretion, proposed in the second place by Mr. Webster. For if we read on in the dictionary, we come across a second definition which seems almost to contradict the first: discretion, in the second place, is understood to be "the quality of being discreet or careful about what one does or says, prudence." No suggestion of power or authority or freedom, but prudence, which is to say a self-imposed restraint, a silence kept or a confidence preserved. And if we read on in First Samuel, we come across Abigail, who surely had spent her life acting in discreet contradiction to her churlish and ill-mannered husband.

What Abigail does in response to word of Nabal's impending doom, and in anticipation of David's determined indiscretion is, in haste and in hiding, prepare a feast: two hundred loaves and two skins of wine, five sheep already dressed, five measures of parched grain, a hundred clusters of raisins and two hundred cakes of figs. All behind Nabal's back does she amass this meal and make her way to David's side. There she implores him to forget this fool she is married to and rather blame her for Nabal's inhospitable reception, even as he forgives her and accepts the feast she has prepared. Now, were that the end of her encounter with David, the cynic might conclude she was simply acting to save her own life and livelihood in the unpleasant person of Nabal...the realist might aver she was desperately attempting appeasement in the presence of unmitigated power. But as she goes on, the point of her action is not only her life and future, but David's. "Pray forgive the trespass of your handmaid," she pleads and then proclaims, "...the life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living in the care of the Lord your God....And when the Lord has done to my lord according to all the good that he has spoken concerning you, and has appointed you prince over Israel, my lord shall have no cause of grief, or pangs of conscience for having shed blood without cause or for my lord taking vengeance himself." With reticence and in hiding, Abigail recalls David to himself, reminds David of the God in whose hand his life is held, and thus redeems the moment from what the social order would have construed as the just repayment of evil for evil. Abigail redeems the moment, instead, for a future whose justice alone rests in God's hand.

David can only say in response, "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you this day to meet me! Blessed be your discretion and blessed be you, who have kept me this day from bloodguilt and from avenging myself with my own hand."

More than we ever know, my friends, God is a God who deals with us very carefully, very prudently, very discreetly. Our sin is never a surprising revelation to the One who fashioned us from dust; our weaknesses and failures are not news to this God who knows our frame and has no need to cause a further falling from grace. Hence time and time again, God carefully sends an Abigail in the face of David's anger...God prudently sends a Nathan in light of kingly lust...God discreetly sends, to Saul breathing threats and murder against the disciples, an Ananias who calls him "Brother" and bids him be baptized "Paul"...God sends--to countless sinners in the midst of a multitude of indiscretions--the Christ, that our sins might be covered and redemption discreetly and painfully wrought out of the rubble of our human lives.

I think it was this week filled with subpoenas and stained dresses that thus sent me not only to I Samuel, but also to words written in a time when the evil the world was up against could not be smugly reported on the evening news for the sake of better ratings. In that time and from his prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer addressed this penchant within the human psyche for expose, with a theological seriousness few in our time can muster. "I've been thinking again over what I wrote to you recently about our own fear," he writes to Eberhard Bethge referring to what seems an inconsequential confession of inmates concerning their fear at the time of an airraid. "I think that here, under the guise of honesty, something is being passed off as 'natural' that is at bottom a symptom of sin ....After all, 'truthfulness' does not mean uncovering everything that exists. God...made clothes for [our wearing]; and that means that in statu corruptionis many things in human life ought to remain covered....Exposure is cynical, and although the cynic prides himself on his exceptional honesty, or claims to want truth at all costs, he misses the crucial fact that since the fall, there must be reticence and secrecy...[He is, I believe, referring to a truthfulness, for example, which would tell the Nazis where Jews were being hidden.]... Speaking the truth," he concludes, "means, in my opinion, saying how something really is--that is showing respect for secrecy, intimacy, and concealment. ...What is secret may be revealed only in confession, i.e. in the presence of God." Even in the comparative triviality of our time, Bonhoeffer's council seems impossible to abide: the concealment rather than the exposure of sin...a respect for secrecy, intimacy and concealment?

It is, of course, not fair as we have come to equate fairness with public accountability for sins of bedroom and backroom and personal bank account. It is not fair, as we enter a time when women and minorities and all manner of previously invisible victims surely deserve their day in court. It is not fair and no way to order a society or, for that matter, a church or a family, keeping secret the actions and omissions which have hurt or destroyed the least of these. Yet where between our obsession with the publicly sensational exposure of sin, and our deeper desire for a just and humane society, can we make room again for the redemptive possibilities of God's blessed discretion? How can we quit the televised disclosures, in favor of the careful word spoken face to face, and do so without fooling ourselves as to the relentless power of evil? Where can we begin again to establish the kind of honesty which is paradoxically dependent on the keeping of confidences? And when can you and I begin to bear the greater consequences of taking unto ourselves--which is to say covering rather than exposing--the sins and weaknesses of another, until the way be clear for repentance and forgiveness and new life?

The fact is, for the most part, we cannot. Such are the very things we cannot do...that seem abhorrent and unfair and even unhealthy to do in these latter days. We are left only to say, thanks be to God that grace rests not in our hands. For such is what God in Christ has done once for all in this feast prepared for sinners' sake, and what he continues to do daily as the Abigails and the Nathans and the Ananiases find their way discreetly into the broken lives of those whose sins exposed would seem to seal their doom...whose sins covered at great cost call forth the gratitude only true redemption in human lives has wrought.

But there is more, For if such grace is really operative in our lives, then I do believe we are strangely freed, and thus compelled in these times, radically to reconsider our public dealings with one another. Later in his letters Bonhoeffer returns to this question of expose or, as he calls it, "sniffing-around-after-people's-sins in order to catch them out. It is as if you couldn't know a fine house till you had found a cobweb in the furthest cellar, or as if you couldn't adequately appreciate a good play till you had seen how the actors behave offstage...a basic anti-social attitude of mistrust and suspicion...." which assumes theologically that human beings "can be addressed as sinners only after their weaknesses and meannesses have been spied out" and exposed.

Yet it is not the sins of weakness, says Bonhoeffer, that matter Biblically so much as the sins of strength....the sins which continue to order the world along lines of rich and poor, well-fed and hungry, white and of color, powerful and oppressed. "We shouldn't," says Bonhoeffer, "continue to run people down in their worldliness, but confront them with God at their strongest point."

The time has come for the church to return to the public arena as that community which relentlessly sniffs around after the sins of the strong-armed bullies of the world...that returns to the headlines and the nightly news questions concerning the powers and principalities of our time...that refuses to rest easy with alliances which keep half the world hungry and ignorant...that calls on the carpet of public opinion the larger lies of those reporting the so-called truth. That uses blessed discretion as regards human weakness but expresses blessed outrage as regards the misuse of power.

May God send this nation and this church an Abigail: to recall us to ourselves and so redeem this time being of ours from insignificance.

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