This is an excerpt from President Bush’s remarks yesterday, where he personally handed the Dalai Lama the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal, our highest civilian honor.

After meeting privately Tuesday with President Bush, The Dalai Lama, brushed off China‘s furious reaction to the U.S. celebrations, “That always happens,” he mused, with his liberating laugh.

The president’s attendance at the ceremony marked the most public embrace ever of the Tibetan leader by an American leader. “I will continue to urge the leaders of China to welcome the Dalai Lama to China. They will find this good man to be a man of peace and reconciliation.” Bush pointedly chastised nations where there has been a “stubborn endurance of religious repression” and urged China to relax its policy on Tibet.

President Bush then waxed sappy and self congratulatory. “As a nation, we are humbled to know that a young boy in Tibet –, His Holiness kept a model of the Statue of Liberty at his bedside. Years later, on his first visit to America, he went to Battery Park in New York City so he could see the real thing up close. On his first trip to Washington, he walked through the Jefferson Memorial — a monument to the man whose words launched a revolution that still inspires men and women across the world. Jefferson counted as one of America‘s greatest blessings the freedom of worship. It was, he said, “a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government, and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.”

Today, I want to praise President Bush for a historic, weighty and risky use of his office. Other Presidents have played parlor games in offering the Dalai Lama the clout of our superpower.

At the same time I challenge Mr. Bush on his shallow caricature of the Dalai Lama as a quaint spiritual teacher seeking “freedom of worship.”

He is a religious leader in the most noble and integrated lineage of Moses, Gandhi, King, and Mandela; carrying himself with deep dignity, meekly yet firmly insisting, “Let my people go!”

In many ways the Dalai Lama has become to American’s and our government like the plastic Jesus on our collective car dashboard, a figure who is ultimately discounted into oblivion via excessive honor.

Rev. Clinton Lee Scott preached, “It is easier blindly to venerate the saints than to learn the human quality of their sainthood. To worship the wise is much easier than to profit by their wisdom. Grandchildren of those who stoned the prophet sometimes gather up the stones to build the prophet’s monument….It is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.”

As His Holiness remarked, “that always happens.”

Scott offered this altar call. “Great leaders are honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values.

America, and President Bush, I’ll see you at the altar.