I had an earlier podcast about Jimmy Carter in February of 2023. He has woven in and out of my life for forty plus years. His funeral has been a powerful moment to stop and consider what life is about. That’s what funerals at their best can accomplish. We mark a passing, but also stop to mark our own journey to the same place. Maybe we slow down long enough to ask, “Am I living life as it is meant to be?

​In early 2009, I was asked to host Jimmy Carter’s visit to Birmingham for the New Baptist Covenant. He was the keynote speaker. The New Baptist Covenant was a movement created to build racial reconciliation, help for the poor, and a call to live out the authentic Christian faith as Jesus called Christians to do—through advocacy for justice, feeding the hungry and lifting up those who are disregarded by the unjust structures that humans often create.

​Here is a quote from my newsletter on February 2 of that year. “We live in a time of intellectual impatience, verbal abuse and unkindness and general disrespect.” It was right after the election of Barack Obama., and it didn’t take long for the repercussions and reactions to appear. 

I was a pastor in deep South, in Alabama, so I knew the undercurrent of bad history and prejudice that still lies deep in the heart of people, but I was not ready for what I saw and heard. No need to rehearse it, just note that distrust, division and untruths live on among us. But the words have stayed true now for 15 years., A bit of a discouraging truth. We have become harsh and too angry in our conversations to and about one another.  

​Social media has created an amazing opportunity to communicate with each other.  People can respond to an article or idea someone puts online.  There is a heady freedom in writing things you don’t have to be identified with or responsible for.  When you sign your nameyou are saying, in effect, “I will accept responsibility for these things I am saying.  You may know who I am, where I live, and what my phone number is, should you need to speak with me about them.”

​Now we drown in bots, lies, and algorithms. We don’t have time to fact check and so we simply pass on whatever comes to us without the necessary devotion to seek out the truth. We have seen the world of anonymity on the internet tempt people to say things they would never speak in polite company.  I see so many things people write–many really thoughtful comments on the blogs, but often interspersed with profanity, verbal abusiveness, unkindness and disrespect.  (I will refrain from my pet peeve–rampant misspelling and bad grammar.  We should loose a cloud of retired English teachers upon the web like a plague of locusts.  If you’re going to be disrespectful to all the rest of us, you can at least spell correctly.)  

Enemies can only reconcile face to face.  Problems are best solved in honest, painful, respectful dialogue.  The further we are from someone else, the easier it is to hurt them, trash them, vilify them, verbally criticize and generally avoid community.  

​I experienced a wonderful opportunity for community building at the New Baptist Covenant.  I sensed there a great hunger, not merely among Baptist folk, but all people, to figure out in this disconnected, hostile, stressed out, challenging time to find something deeper and more lasting that can help us through life.  I believe that is most powerfully found in practicing the teachings and example of Jesus.

​The call to love one another is not a platitude or a cliché.  It is a prescription for what ails us.  We need authentic communion with God and each other.  It is what God made us to experience.  It takes reaching out, but it can always happen with God’s help.

​Jimmy Carter had an ability to make people mad when he spoke his truth. He was plain spoken, never said in a raised voice, but also never mild and squishy. That morning,  I got to sit on one side of the former President. My good friend and co-host, Rev. Arthur Price of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church sat on the other. President Carter was wonderful, asking about us, our ministries, and we felt as though he was blessed to sit with us, not the other way around.

​The meeting was wonderful, like heaven itself. We worshiped together, across lines of race, age, denominations and differences. I’d like to tell you the world changed. We got some publicity, of course, but fixing a world like ours doesn’t happen with a little excitement. The powers that be don’t give up easily.

​Many people in the larger community came up to tell me what a wonderful event it was and how they supported it. A few, of course, even from among my own, were more negative. Jimmy’s politics and presidency were against the long Southern grain that came in the aftermath of George Wallace, Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

​Jimmy didn’t mind. He went right on, building houses, seeking to join people of good will wherever they were. That is a model I think is a good idea for our time. In the midst of an adolescent all or nothing politics of blood and division, what are we to do? David French, a conservative Christian was asked by a group of students after our most recent election, alarmed about the anger and vitriol that they witnessed, even among Christian people if he had any advice for them as Christians. He answered, “Protect the vulnerable and speak the truth.”

​That also means the truth as Jesus meant it, not as we wish it to be. We cannot be done with opponents and those with whom we disagree. It means, be firm in the truth, stand up for it, but also be ready to repent and reconcile wherever we may. 

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​John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, was a man of broad spirit and reconciling heart.  He sought Christian cooperation in every way possible.  He once preached a sermon on 2 Kings 10:15, which says, “When [Jehu] left there, he met Jehonadab son of Rechab coming to meet him; he greeted him, and said to him, “Is your heart as true to mine as mine is to yours?” Jehonadab answered, “It is.” Jehu said, “If it is, give me your hand.” So he gave him his hand. Jehu took him up with him into the chariot.”

​Wesley said “But although a difference in opinions or modes of worship may prevent an entire external union, yet need it prevent our union in affection? Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences.”

​In other words, unity of heart, spirit and love can exist even though we must have differences that will take longer to resolve.  We begin with this willingness to know a fellow Christian’s heart and build upon the possibility of fellowship.  It does not mean give up our convictions.  But we must begin with the hardest and highest call Jesus gave to us—to love one another as He loved us.  That is not what we do once we have worked out all our disagreements, our differences or our hurts with one another.  Forgiveness itself is born out of obedience to the Savior’s call to love one another.  

​That is what I wrote in 2009. I stand by it. If you are willing to take my hand and do good with me, come on. If our hearts are one, even if all else is “not yet,” then give me your hand. This is the miracle of Christian community, and I would add, the hope of an angry, hostile and troubled world.

That was Jimmy Carter’s best instinct. He told the truth. He spoke for the vulnerable. And he never seemed to give up on those with whom he differed. I am going to try my best to do that, too, as a bit of gratitude for the man from Plains. It never was about getting everything your way in this life, you know. It’s what you do with what you were given.