Let's Practice What She Preached

We are all honored by the President’s selection of our General Minister and President, Sharon Watkins, to deliver the sermon at the traditional day-after-the inauguration service at the Washington Cathedral. We Disciples may be justly proud, but the honor goes to her. And a mighty sermon it was!

Dr. Watkins invoked both the thrust of the gospel and the crisis of the decisions facing the new President and his Administration. And she did it without bowing to the gooey piety and sexism that may have marked another religious presentation at the swearing in ceremony itself. She called on the President to hold his ground on America's--and our faith’s --deepest values, and not to be drawn away from his ethical center. "Stay centered on the values that have empowered us to move through the perils of earlier times."

How did she suggest he do this? Her central illustration was the old Cherokee story of the two inner wolves. One was anger, vengefulness, resentment, self-pity and fear. The other was compassion, hope, truth and love.

"Which one wins, grandfather?" asks he grandson.

"The one you feed," he replied.

Dr. Watkins went on to take a quick look at the attitudes and policies which grow out of feeding the noble wolf. They are simply put: compassion, reaching out toward others--even our enemies--seeking peaceful alternatives, putting down the sword, imaging a world where liberty and justice prevail, welcoming the tired and poor of the world---an image enshrined by Emma Lazareth and displayed on the Statue of Liberty.

In concrete specific terms this clearly means a commitment in law, as well as in theory, to both domestic and international policies centering on mercy, good-will, justice and peace.

It strikes me that these are the very policies and actions that have been spelled out in the clear convictions articulated by our denomination year after year as we have honed them to sharply put points in our General Assemblies. In these gatherings, through their statements, we have fed the noble wolf biennial after biennial.

We now seem faced with the temptation, not to feed the vicious wolf, but to increasingly starve the noble one. We seem afraid that too much ecclesial protein may cause indigestion among those of our diminished number who take a much more cautious approach to the very issues Dr. Watkins, by implication, asked the President not to abandon. Let’s hope we are not reduced to mush in a world in which the Lord of the church asks for the kind of ecclesial response our General Minister and President asked of President Obama.

But that’s just my opinion. What’s yours?