January 12 – First Sunday after Epiphany
Micah 5.2-5a
Mathew 2.1-12
The Magus of the Plains
First Sunday after Epiphany
There have been a lot of wonderful words written and spoken about President Jimmy Carter in the last week, and this morning I’d like to add a few of my own.
President Carter was an extremely accomplished individual. As a Lieutenant in the US Navy, he became the executive officer of the crew that would build and prepare the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus. In fact his third son, Donnel, was born in New London at the time. He resigned his commission when his father died, in order to take over the family business of peanut farming. As Governor of Georgia, he shocked some of his contemporaries, allies and dissenters alike, when he declared in his inaugural address, “the time for racial discrimination is over.” 39th President of the United States, he was elected in the wake of the Watergate scandal and President Gerald Ford’s peremptory pardon of former President Richard Nixon. Carter was famously quoted as saying, “I will never lie to you,” and defeated Ford. In his four years in office, he brokered the Camp David accords and brought what has so far been a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt. He oversaw the deregulation of the airline industry. He tripled the size of the nation’s protected wilderness areas. He was instrumental in making seatbelts and airbags standard issue in the automobile industry, saving an estimated 9000 American lives annually. He negotiated and signed the Salt II agreement with the Soviet Union and normalized diplomatic and trade relations with China. And in a pair of underrated notes, he deregulated the homebrewing industry, a huge factor in the growth of craft brewing, and he was America’s first rock & roll president, forging genuine friendships with the Allman Brothers, Willie Nelson, and Bob Dylan, who once said of the president, “There’s many sides to him. He’s a nuclear engineer, woodworking carpenter. He’s a poet. He’s a dirt farmer. If you told me he was a race-car driver, I wouldn’t be surprised.” I know it is fashionable to say Carter was a better post-President than President, but I think it is as much a tribute to his energy and work ethic in the 43 years he lived after leaving the Oval Office as it is to the 4 he spent there.
We heard the story of the magi this morning from Matthew. Like Dylan’s estimation of Carter, the magi represented many things. They were seers from the east – the word magi, or in the singular, magus, would most easily translate into English as magician. They were thought to have the powers to divine the heavens, which is why the presence of the star is so important to the story. They were considered royalty: today we call them the three kings, although as we remembered a few weeks ago, the Bible never tells us how many there were, only the number of gifts they brought to the manger. They were considered priests – in Persia the magi were part of the religious class. They were the resistance: they thwarted the wiles of King Herod, saw through his dishonest sanctimony, prevented his edict from ever reaching the Holy family, and evaded capture by finding an alternative way home. The way Matthew tells the story, God found a way of working through the magi to speak truth to power, to use their gifts in the service of Jesus Christ, and to bear witness to the person and presence of God in a troubled world.
It is in these senses that we might say the Jimmy Carter too was a wise man. Carter ruffled more than a few establishment feathers with his insistence on adhering to the truth even when it was inconvenient and apolitical. He bore witness to the presence and importance of seeing and understanding God in the world – he was a Sunday School teacher for life, and who is more blessed than a Sunday School teacher? And to say he utilized his gifts and skills in the service of Jesus Christ is only to make a gross understatement. From peace in the middle east to housing the homeless, he wielded the tools of diplomacy with as much skill as he did the simple tools of the carpenter.
He will be remembered for many things. For his life-long commitment to Habitat for Humanity; for his steadfast faith, even and especially when it collided with the ways of Washington; for his tireless efforts to free the Americans held hostage in Iran, which we have since come to learn were short-circuited by his political adversaries; for his life-long love and dedication to his wife Rosalynn; for his gentle smile which masked his resolute and sometimes stubborn temperament; for his dedication to world peace which drove and continues to drive the mission of the Carter Center; and we spoke at length a couple years ago of his work toward eradicating guinea worm disease, a horrific but entirely preventable disease that plagued seventeen African nations. Consider this: while there were roughly 3.5 million cases of guinea worm disease in the 1980’s, by 2023 there were only 14 known cases, thanks to the work of the former President and the Carter Center.
But for me what stands atop the long list of traits and achievements was and will always be Carter’s dedication to telling the truth. His 1976 campaign pledge, “I will never lie to you,” sounds almost quaint today. But it was a powerful antidote to the Watergate years. Vice-President Walter Mondale offered the succinct summation of their time in office: “We told the truth. We kept the peace. We obeyed the law.” These three would seem to be a no-brainer for office holders of every stripe, but sadly, we may be excused for wondering it the same holds true today. In a day when truth appears relative, when social media twists established science and fact to its own commercial and political advantage, Carter’s determination serves as both a warning and a solution whenever and wherever peoples and nations teeter on the precipice of prevarication and false equivalencies. We remember the story of Jesus standing before Pontius Pilate in the hours before his crucifixion. When the Roman governor of Judea interrogated him, Jesus replied in part, “I have come into the world to testify to the truth.” Pilate asked him mockingly, “What is truth?” as though the Roman government had the power to establish its own truths. Jesus’ refusal to answer the question revealed the governor’s – and the government’s – illegitimacy. Likewise Carter’s dedication to telling the truth set him apart and continues to shine a bright light in the dark corners of hypocrisy, mendacity and falsehood.
Carter was not perfect. He was the first to admit it. To this day I still wish he had never done that Playboy interview. But he was willing to learn from his experiences. He was a child of the south who grew to fight racism. He had a promising Naval career but left to look over his family and business when his father died. He was perceived as a failed president who went on to win a Nobel prize. And as biographers as diverse as Jonathan Alter, Kai Bird and Stuart Eizenstat agree, he accomplished more in a single term than some presidents have in two. But he steadfastly adhered to the ethic of Jesus. Think about it: he worked hard to fight disease, he was determined to broker peace, and he worked tirelessly to provide housing for the poor – in other words he acted as a healer and a peacemaker who brought good news to the poor. From Plains, Georgia straight out of the Sermon on the Mount.
One more story, you may have heard it in this week’s many tributes, but I did not. In the 90’s sitcom “Home Improvement,” there was an episode in which Tim Allen’s character and his wife compete to see whose team can build a home faster for Habitat for Humanity. I don’t recall who actually won – I’m guessing it was his wife. But the episode concluded with a televised message from Jimmy Carter, who said to Allen, “Tim – what can I say? [Habitat] crews are working around the clock to repair what you just built.” At the end of the day, he was a homespun southerner, a wise man of Georgia, a Magus of the Plains.