I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would… guide us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to conduct ourselves with compassion, humility, and the peaceful spirit of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our religion. Without a humble effort to follow God’s example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation.
Today is the final homily in my four-part series on BT’s core values. For the reading, I didn’t choose a text from religious scripture, but instead, this reading from George Washington. Today’s reading is part of a letter Washington wrote at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783. He was writing to the governors of the states when he resigned his commission as Commander of the American Army. Ever since, Washington’s resignation has been held up as a testament to his values, as he willingly surrendered power back to the government that first appointed him almost ten years earlier. His words aren’t just history. They are a summary of our core values here and a blueprint for our country and the world.
Washington’s words echo one of my favorite verses in the Old Testament, a passage from chapter six in the prophet Micah. Historically, that book was written when the kingdom of Israel had fallen apart. It had torn itself apart from the inside with injustice that had become the normal way of life. The strong were taking advantage of the weak, the wealthy were stacking the system in their favor, the courts could be bought, and leaders spoke pious words while ignoring real suffering. There was a lot of Holy language, but they were bullying the poor, cheating workers, pushing widows and orphans to the margins, and treating strangers like threats instead of neighbors. These things are what Micah and all of the prophets warned against, over and over.
When a society gets comfortable with these things—when it shrugs at unfairness, when it decides some people matter less—that society will inevitably begin to unravel. Trust evaporates. Anger rises. Cynicism hardens people’s hearts. The social fabric frays. There is a loss of shared moral ground—people stop asking, “What is right? What is kind? What is true?” and they only ask, “What’s in it for me?”
Ancient Israel was torn apart from the outside as well, conquered and enslaved by brutal enemies. But Micah’s point is that the collapse didn’t come out of nowhere. A community that forgets justice and mercy becomes vulnerable—because it has already started to unravel from within.
And so we come to my favorite verse. In this part of Micah, the people are crying out to God, “Everything has gone bad! Lord, what kind of offering can we give you so that you’ll remember and rescue us? Do you want burnt offerings with thousands of animals…ten thousand rivers of olive oil?” They even ask the unthinkable, “Lord, do you want human sacrifice?” Micah replies, and you can hear the frustration, maybe even anger, in his words: “God has told you what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly?”
Washington is quoting Micah. The words rang true in 700 BC, they rang true in 1783, and they ring true today. You don’t have to be religious to recognize the wisdom: any community—school, team, family, nation—can only hold together if people practice justice and mercy, humility and compassion. Without these values—which are really the same as BT’s core values—a society cannot long survive.
I hope by now you are starting to understand this simple but vital truth: your core values are not slogans on a poster. They are the architecture of a good life. Compassion, integrity, responsibility, and respect provide the only framework there is that builds a community that is beautiful, not brutal; one that is kind, not cutthroat; one that is generous, not grasping; one that is connected, not cynical.
These four values are parts of a single whole. Compassion opens your heart to the dignity of others. Integrity keeps your inner life and outward actions aligned. Respect makes a space where trust and community can grow. Responsibility turns each of these into action. Think of them as moral grammar—the rules that shape how you speak, how you act, and how you treat people, so the story of your life forms coherent, truthful sentences. That grammar is what these values provide in forming the way you speak, the choices you make, the habits you build, the entire structure of your life. You do not practice them once and move on. In all the moments of your living—mostly ordinary moments, occasionally extraordinary ones—these values provide coherence and meaning.
When George Washington laid down his military command at the end of the Revolutionary War, it was surprising. He could have clung to power. Just the year before, in 1782, one of his military officers suggested that Washington become king to stabilize the new nation. But Washington refused and stepped away. Washington focused on a deeper question than, “Who’s in charge?” He asked instead, “What kind of people do we need to become if we want this experiment of our new nation to work?” When he wrote about justice and mercy, compassion and humility, peace of mind and spirit, Washington was saying: “We’re free now—but freedom alone won’t keep us together. We need shared habits of heart…We need character.”
And that’s exactly why I’ve spent these weeks with BT’s four core values. Not because the school needs four nice words for its website. Not because you need one more poster to walk past in the hallway. But because a community—any community—rises or falls on the daily choices people make when no one’s giving a grade for it. These values are not electives. They become real when they show up together, in your classrooms, at lunch, on the playing field, on the stage…They become real in the middle of every conversation and every conflict.
Compassion notices who’s left out, who needs a lift up. It says no one is a background character. Respect refuses to make someone feel small or stupid or foolish. Integrity does the right thing even when it’s hard or uncomfortable or even embarrassing. Responsibility says, “I can do something about this.”
Here’s the important reason these values have to go together: If you try to “do justice” without compassion, justice can quickly turn into punishment and selfishness. If you “love mercy” without integrity, mercy becomes enabling, avoiding hard truths that need to be faced. If you try to “be peaceful” without responsibility, peace becomes apathy: “It’s not my problem; I’m staying out of it.” But when compassion, integrity, responsibility, and respect work together, the result is a community that tells the truth and still stays kind; a community that faces conflict and still keeps people’s dignity intact. When these values work together, you get a community that takes action when something is unfair—not with outrage that looks for a scapegoat, but with courage that faces complicated situations in ways that protect and uplift people. A community that doesn’t just notice injustice but names it; and doesn’t just name it but does something about it—repairing what can be repaired, changing what must be changed, and standing with those who are most likely to be overlooked. You get a community that will refuse to let “that’s just how it is” be the final answer—because it is a community that has decided dignity matters more than convenience, and that the true measure of its virtue and strength is how it treats the people who have the least power.
This is not about perfection. It is about ongoing, life-long formation. The person who shows up for small things—telling the truth when it would be easier to hide, keeping a promise no one will notice, opening a circle to include someone who is excluded—will be the person who can be trusted in big things. That is the promise and the work of character. Washington says, “Without a humble effort…” Because you are not being asked to become flawless. You are being asked to become faithful to your values—to keep trying, to keep learning, to keep repairing, to keep growing into the kind of people you are meant to be.
Across all of the world’s great traditions, across thousands of years, this message is the same. Different languages, different stories, but the same invitation: Be the kind of person whose presence makes a community more just, more merciful, more peaceful. Washington’s words come from someone at the end of a hard, exhausting, deadly struggle, and he’s saying: “If we don’t learn how to live together with these values, we will throw away what we fought for.”
Technology changes, the headlines change, but the human heart does not change. We still have the same temptations:
And that means the remedy is also the same: practicing the core BT values of compassion, integrity, responsibility, and respect. In the weeks ahead, you’ll be working across the school to name specific, concrete ways you can live out these values—habits you can practice, language you can use, norms you can build. This is your turn to actively work in shaping your culture at BT. My prayer is that the habits you form and the culture you create will spread out from these halls to the world that so desperately needs them.
