Jimmy Carter: More Than A President with Andrew Greer - Episode 596 - Voices in my Head Podcast

Well, welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad for all of you who are here with me today. This is an exciting day for me because I get to reconnect with an old friend, Andrew Greer. Uh, he is an author, he's an editor, he's a filmmaker, he's a great musician, and he not only edited President Jimmy Carter's posthumous book of Sunday school lessons, More Than a President, but he also directed the PBS documentary Plainspoken. It's perhaps the most moving of all, and Andrew actually moved to Plains, Georgia, where he got to know Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter personally during their latter days. So we're going to talk about that journey, the book, the film, and the role of faith in it all. So Andrew Greer, welcome back to Voices in My Head. I'm so glad to have you here with me again today.

Yeah, hi, Rick. It's always good to see and to hear you.

Yeah, yeah, we— the behind-the-scenes joke in that is we've been having some technical difficulties this morning. So my video isn't quite working right on Zoom, but we're an audio podcast. So that's okay. And I'm not sure what's going on with everything today, techie-wise. But I feel like the older I get, I'm turning into my parents where, you know, we were— I'm helping them with their VCR, you know, they can't understand it. And then now I'm the one that needs the help in the midst of everything. It seems like it's so constantly changing with that.

So yes, more constantly than when we were children. So we should give ourselves a break.

That's true. Let's have some grace for ourselves, for sure. Well, Andrew, I was just telling you beforehand, my wife and I, we turned on the PBS app last night, and we watched Plainspoken, and we loved it. It was just so great, all the wonderful conversations that you captured on that. And, and there were some difficult conversations. And I appreciated the way that the whole film was structured, and I wasn't sure quite what to expect. I knew you had released it in the past, but it was just such a joy to sit and watch and see, and such a thoughtful presentation. So congratulations on that. I know it's been out for a little while now, and I feel like I'm a little bit behind having not seen it yet. But the opportunity with this new book that we're going to talk about today, that's such a great companion piece along with it. So before we get too deep into the book, I was just curious What was it that stirred in your heart that inspired you to move to Plains, Georgia? Was that kind of a leap of faith for you to do that?

Uh, it certainly was a unique decision for me. I'm not much of a mover. I grew up in Texas, and when I graduated high school, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee to attend Belmont University, and then have lived in the Nashville area, you know, for— since graduating college 20-something years ago. I'm 42, and so I've lived, you know, my entire adult life in Nashville. I intended on living the rest of my adult life in Nashville. Of course, music kept me there, songwriting and artistry and all that kind of thing. And over the past several years, as I have become more familiar with film— there's a wonderful film production world in Nashville that continues to grow— and of course, through some series that, uh, interview series that I've hosted and directed, and I just learned so much about film. And I always wanted to do some kind of more long-form piece in a documentary style. And two folks that I work with in the film production world in Nashville also had that as a, as a goal, something they had not done in their film careers. And so I have always— this all lands me in planes. I've always, since I guess maybe my freshman or sophomore year of college, someone gave me a really one of President Carter's most beloved books. He authored almost 40 books in his post-presidency, but An Hour Before Daylight was all about his growing up experience in the 1920s and '30s here in Plains, Georgia, actually in a little village which really is no longer called Archery, Georgia, which is just about 2 or 3 miles outside of downtown Plains, which— Plains is a town of 500 to 600 people and always has been, so that's not saying much. It's not a suburb. Yeah, right. It was farmland, uh, back 100 years ago. But I didn't realize one of our modern presidents, uh, President and Mrs. Carter, were in the White House just before I was born. I was born in the Reagan era. And really, their legacy was not very sexy when I was growing up in the '90s. It wasn't until the 2000s where he won the Nobel Peace Prize and their humanitarian efforts to help end disease and to, you know, to, uh, view and observe and, and take care of fair elections in formerly dictator countries. All that kind of meaty stuff hadn't really taken hold until I was in college. So that paired with this book, um, that I read, An Hour Before Daylight, just kind of, uh, it really more than piqued my interest. It was like, I, I've got to experience this place, because that's where the book was set. And in that, Rick, I found out that he taught Sunday school. I did not know that a former president of the United taught Sunday school every other weekend, uh, of the year. And he of course did that from the time he came back to Plains from the White House in 1981 until the end of 2019 when he was 95 years old. And so, uh, somewhere in that 2006-2007 range, um, I loaded up some willing friends and we came down to Plains and went to Sunday school. And it was just such a unique experience, and I would say even more unique almost 20 years later to to think of a former political leader here in America, in the United States, actually being dedicated to, um, to interpreting, understanding, gleaning insight from an ancient text like the Bible, uh, to having a foundation of spirituality that really does not just motivate their movement throughout the world but is actually of interest to them. How does this shape and apply to my everyday life. So I was fascinated from that first visit. A classic Sunday school with President Carter thing was, uh, Sunday school was in the same sanctuary that only holds about 300 people, uh, shoulder to shoulder. Yeah, if you went to Sunday school and stayed for church in the same building right after that, a piano and organ, a little choir, all that, then you could take pictures with President and Mrs. Carter afterwards. So that was the incentive. So I stayed through church, took pictures, and then just explored all of the sites and got to know the town better. Jump forward about 10 years, and I happened to be coming back through Plains after being chased out of Florida by a hurricane. And I was making my way to Nashville slowly because I had some days unplanned, and I ended up again here on a weekend, but on a non-event weekend. And ended up going to Maranatha Baptist, uh, where President Carter taught all those 40 years after the White House. Uh, met people who are now my neighbors, George and Jane Williams, who are some mutual friends of another pastor friend of mine. And then in walks, um, Jimmy and Rosalynn, you know, and there's just about 30 of us in Sunday school. His niece Kim was teaching Sunday school. It was a non-event, is a non-Jimmy Sunday, if you will. Yeah. And Kim, who's a dear friend now, was teaching. She's a fabulous teacher. But they walked in and they loved guests. And so they sat right down beside me and started talking to me about Nashville. They asked if I knew some of their good friends, um, Garth and Tricia Brooks. And, uh, and so we— that whole process, you know, of course he had become one of my heroes through his writings, through his work in the world, both of them really through the initiatives of seeing people. That's what I would call their work, was a work of seeing people and then getting creative about how to meet the needs of the people that they saw. And I stayed in town for a few days, learned more about how Plains is a deep southern town with a train track running through it, and the majority of Black citizens live on one side, majority of white citizens live on the other side. And I was just curious, considering how, uh, large and dynamic of humanitarians they were in the world, which included a lot of human rights, equal rights, civil rights and their history of work. And I started thinking, okay, how does that apply to this little hamlet that they have continued to come back to? I mean, they lived in the only house they've ever owned from the 1960s. So there was something at this place that drew them back, but under their purview, what was going on here? And that's what turned into Plainspoken, the documentary that was on PBS. And I hope it's a hopeful look, an inspiring look at that Yes, while the fabric of Plains is the Deep South, and that you can't erase the history of the Deep South— it's a rich history, um, in ways it's a terrifying history, but it's the real history. And that's still going to play out in different ways. But as long as, like Andy Young, who was, uh, ambassador to the UN under Carter and then mayor of Atlanta for years, as he said, but what you see in the people of Plains and the people of Maranatha is they trying. Yeah. And that's what I connected with, Rick, here was a community of people, a small community of people who knew one another. And with all the warts, all the flaws, all the wonderful, quirky, charming things too, there's an essence of we keep trying. And I really wanted to be a part of a community. I grew up in a small community in Texas that was always trying together. And I wanted to be in that kind of environment again. Nashville's grown into a really large place. I love Nashville. I will never be divorced from Nashville. It's a part of me. But this is definitely for this season. I'm not sure how long, but Plains is my home. I'm sitting right here across from the downtown. And so that's a long circuitous route to how I got here, but really all those blocks, um, were part of building a foundation where I met a new community that was, that is my family and my home.

Well, I really enjoyed the documentary. Just, it's the one part that really stood out to me and was the part about the graveyard that's there in Plains, because I feel like this is kind of the way that it's, it's, it's America broadly in one little microcosm. You know, it's, we can see it. And it talks about in the documentary, it's, it's basically the same graveyard. But on one side, the white people are buried. On the other side, the Black people are buried. And it's the white side that has the paved roads. And still to this day, the road is not paved on the side where the African American people are buried. And so it's, it's interesting, because I've talked before. And we haven't caught up in a while, actually. But I've been working as a hospital chaplain for the last couple of years. So there's been a lot of training that goes into that, especially the things that I'm learning and new relationships I'm building. And we have these difficult conversations because we serve everybody in a hospital. And one illustration I've used in the past, that the kind of the history of this country in a lot of ways seems to be like, it's not that, it's not that people don't have, um, the same opportunities, but the opportunities aren't presented in the same way. And I liken it to my neighborhood in the wintertime. We get a lot of snow here in Ohio where I live. And so if one side of the street is completely shoveled for you in advance, and the goal is to get to the end of that street. The one that has the side shoveled is— it's a very— it's a much easier walk. You can still get to the end of the street on the other side that's not been shoveled at all, but you got to walk through, you know, snowdrifts and deep banks, and it takes you twice as long to get there. It's harder, and you can still get to the end of the street, but there's obstacles. There's things in the way that the side that has been shoveled and, you know, salt put down and everything, it's just a different story. It's the same place, it's the same street, but it's two sides of the same street. And one side doesn't always see the perspective of the other and the challenges that are faced there and things that have gone through. So I really appreciated the way that your documentary brought all that out in the way that it shared both sides of the conversation and helped to add new perspectives.

Well, you know, like, hopefully this is taking a note from President and Mrs. Carter, is seeing all the perspectives and also not bringing my perspective too heavily in, right? I come from, especially having been in Nashville for so many years now, which is a more metropolitan area in thought, and I have my kind of politically correct ways of seeing things or understanding things that are sometimes told to me and then cultured in me rather than experienced. It's a less experiential thing. And so coming into Plains, I experienced you know, people, and, and their perspectives are the true perspectives because it's their lived experience. And now it's becoming a part of my lived experience, but it's important for me to pay attention to that, to learn from that, to grow from that, and not to insert, which I think in today's culture we do a lot of insertion. And that's something I always appreciate about President Carter is I don't sense that he felt his voice was more important. Now, was he confident in his leadership? I do think that's true, and that's how he accomplished so much. But did he think his voice was more important than another person's? No. A good example of this, and he talks about this in, in the Sunday school lessons, in the book More Than a President, um, that's coming out in October, he talks about how through the Carter Center, which is their major nonprofit humanitarian organization that works throughout the world with several objectives. And one is ending disease that hasn't been paid attention to. So they try not to overlap with, you know, the CDCs of the world and things like that, um, and to really attack things that haven't been attacked yet. And one was the guinea worm disease, which is an ancient parasite through unfiltered water, dirty water sources. But when they'd go into these small communities, primarily in Africa and Asia and rural areas, these water sources had a sort of sacred base in the spirituality of the community because it was their water source, right? And so they kind of believed there was some ancestral and spiritual, like, significance to these water sources. And so they didn't want to filter them, they didn't want to touch them, they didn't want to change their, their way of life, if you will. But it was the direct— the direct result was these worms, this larvae that would get in their system, these worms that would grow up painfully from their bodies and cause infections. And a really kind of horrifying disease that's been going on for, you know, thousands of years. With that said, what it required to— what it required was listening to them, hearing their history, sharing in their perspective and their story, and then earning their trust, not in a manipulative way, but in a truly, we care about you, we see you kind of way. And through the building of a network of community, which, guess what, you can't do that overnight. That takes decades sometimes.

Yeah.

Then it begins to change. Guinea worm will be the second disease in the world to be eradicated. Only the second disease. But that requires a level of listening and seeing, hearing and sharing that I just don't think is sexy in, in today's fast— we've always been fast-paced, but we just— I think it takes a lot of patience to really communicate with one another. And that's one of the things I'm drawn to Plains about— I think that's one of the things that Carters were drawn to Plains about. They could get back into a fabric, uh, of, of, of a slower pace of patient listening. And I think these Sunday school lessons are a part of his expression of that. Again, the ability to be in Lebanon on Saturday and still be teaching at the lectern in a small A-frame church in a town of 500 people in the Deep South on Sunday. I think that was not just about what he thought was important for others, but I think it was important for his own, um, spiritual sensibility and, um, human beingness, you know.

Yeah, well, that was beautifully said. I really appreciate the— that whole illustration.

And, um, oh, and Rick Lee James— yeah, hold that thought, but The cemetery here now is paved on both sides. That was one of President Carter's wishes before he passed away. So since the filming of the documentary, and today when you and I are talking, it is now paved just as a symbol of equality.

Yeah, that is fantastic. And you see those little glimpses even, you know, in the film, repairing the guy's water, you know, and the one home that didn't have it for like 2 and a half years and, and And so much of it was due to his leadership, you know, and I really appreciated the way that the film brought that out. Well, let's, you know, let's talk about the book before we run out of time today a little bit more, which is, as I understand it, because I haven't read it yet because it hasn't come out quite yet. Yes, but it's a collection of his sermon— or not sermon, Sunday school lessons. Sorry.

That's correct.

And I would be curious to know, as you edited and compiled them all together, what for you were some of the highlights, uh, throughout the, the lessons that he taught, things that just kind of stood out in your heart and in your mind that he taught?

Gosh, that's a wonderful question because he taught on such a diverse set of, of scriptures. You know, he used the literature the church was using as a, a leaping off, a jumping off point into his lesson. So he stuck with what the church was doing, which I also respect, and didn't just kind of renegade. And so therefore with any good Sunday school class, you're going to cover a lot of different, um, passages in the Bible, a lot of different kind of interesting subjects. I mean, he gets into Ecclesiastes and, you know, who knows what that means. And, um, and but he does a beautiful job of bringing out some sort of understanding with the humility that his gleaning. His interpretation is not, you know, canonized scripture, you know, that it's, it's merely our— I think that's one of the main things. I'll answer your question, but one of the main things to the fabric of these, when I started listening to them, I found some copies hidden away in the library of the church one day, just rummaging through. And then I thought, surely these are all compiled somewhere in archive. Thankfully came to find out that at the Presidential Library in Atlanta, his presidential library, they are comprehensively since the '70s when he was teaching at First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C. as President of the United States. Um, someone has always, most always had the wherewithal to record them and then later video them. So there's a wonderful archive of them for posterity, um, in the catalogs. I began to listen to hundreds of them looking for just what you're asking about. What are those lessons that really express something that is not only relevant to our culture today but is kind of timeless. And I think President Carter was timeless and evergreen in his approach to his spirituality and to the Bible. I think what you'll see recurring throughout the lessons, uh, is what I talked about earlier, and that is an element of seeing. I, I think what he draws from even the Old Testament passages that he touches on that then are you know, really, um, painting a picture of what's to come in the life of Jesus, or what, what needs and what gaps will be filled with the life of Jesus. Um, it is about, uh, in fact, the title of one of the Sunday School lessons in the book is Knowing and Loving. And that sounds really, you know, a bit Hallmark-y, but I think the practicals of knowing and loving goes back to what we're talking about, building that network of villages to help eradicate the guinea worm disease, is to truly take the space and time.

Yeah.

To know someone. And that Jesus seemed, within what we know of his life and what President Carter highlights about his life, seemed to really take seriously knowing, uh, people. And then that gave him a window into loving them, even though, sure, Jesus was God, and so therefore could, you know, had omniscience and omnipotence and all that kind of power at his fingertips. But it seems the limitations of his humanity caused him to interact in the present day, which gives us therefore our example within the confines of our humanity. And you see a lot of pictures, a lot of President Carter using that kind of limitation for humanity, going back to Jesus and saying, how do we know people? How do we love people? Um, and he uses some practical examples from life. But, um, I think one thing that he does in a few of these lessons is he hallmarks women. And that was a crescendo for President Carter. Uh, he definitely was born in the 1920s and '30s, got married in the 1940s to Rosalynn. They were married 77 years before Rosalynn passed away in 2023. So a committed relationship, a loving relationship, a growing relationship. But he definitely, uh, confessed about how many decisions he made unilaterally in their marriage, even after they had children, until he began to— and I think probably with Rosalind's help— uh, began to open his eyes and his mind and his heart to the equality, not just the equality of women as women, but inside of marriage, that true partnership. And I really believe that was the, the open door to the rest of their lives and really to their, to the possibility of their position and influence in the world. That was as much Rosen as it was President Carter, which he would have said readily. But the hallmarking of women in Jesus's time by Jesus is something that he does not understate here, even though it's a bit understated in scripture because of the time.

Yeah.

Of the, of the, the history, uh, in which the scriptures were written. And I just think that's, um, it's another part of seeing, um, to see how Jesus also was countercultural in that. Even go beyond that, he's hallmarking women in these certain Sunday school lessons or the passages that he's studying there. Go into that Jesus was countercultural and then apply that to our lives today. What is countercultural to what is popular? It seems that at least in the United States that we want to protect our way of life, my way of life, my little plot of land at all costs. And that includes the cost of human beings. And I think we have a, you know, kind of a reckoning that we're in that is countercultural. And as a follower of Jesus, I have to be willing to be a part of that reckoning. And I think President Carter throughout these Sunday School lessons continues to confront us us right here in our place as Americans, because he was teaching a lot of Americans. He was also teaching people from— who visited from all over the world. But to say again, how does our faith play out? Um, I didn't answer your question directly, I kind of gave a broad swab. Um, that's great. But anyway, but yeah, it hits on everything from Isaiah to, to Gospels, uh, Mark and John, to again Ecclesiastes, like I said, to the Psalms, to Jonah. Um, a really interesting a pair of lessons about Jonah that illuminated some aspects I didn't really remember, that Jonah was really prejudiced against, uh, a sinful people and therefore did not want to take God's directive, um, to deliver them because of kind of a resentment of like, well, why would you deliver them when they haven't been faithful, you know, kind of thing. And how true to us is that, you know, kind of thing.

Yeah. So Yeah. Oh yeah, that is truly one of the great books. And Jonah, I always comment whenever it comes up in a Sunday school lesson, like he never does the right thing. Like one time, one time, one time when he finally, you know, it's like, Lord, I'll give myself back to you. And it gets vomited up on the shore. And then from then on, he goes back to very begrudgingly giving this message. And he's, I didn't want them to be saved. And, you know, So it's just amazing.

And then it ends so bizarrely, which is almost perfection.

Yeah.

You know, because it ends with like, basically, right, that he's just kind of left out on his own. It's just— yeah, go ahead.

I was just saying, the writer of Job, like, Flannery O'Connor had nothing on the end of Job for sure, because Flannery O'Connor had these, you know, big open endings of like, what happened? You know, so Uh, that's great.

Well, and this right here, I'll just— I'll, I'll read this real quick. This is the very end of that lesson. This is President Carter's words. Um, uh, that's the kind of surprising thing, but it's also sobering thing to say that God's power is there. He created everything. He knows everything. But in order to implement God's will on Earth, to further the realization of God's kingdom, God's power has to be utilized or demonstrated where within me and within you. That's the lesson that we should remember this morning. Not the fish, not the pagan sailors, not even the people of Nineveh, not even Jonah and the bush and the worm, although it's dramatic. The essence of it is that God's power, in the case of Nineveh, was exhibited through his presence and through some reluctant words of Jonah. And Jonah was not necessarily a good man in God's eyes. But we who know Christ, who know God's mercy and love and care and forgiveness and compassion with a promise of eternal life, have a much greater responsibility or opportunity to expand our our hearts and expand our minds and encompass others, and to emulate or copy example that Christ set for us. That's our responsibility. So we can leave here and go the rest of our lives— 2 days, 2 years, 20 years, the rest of our lives— and never fulfill the essence of our being as Christians, which means what? Little Christ. Are we accurate when we say, 'I am a little Christ'? So those are— that gives you a little essence of President Carter's admonition through, uh, the scriptures. And it's always to not just point the finger at the reluctance of Jonah, or at the— like you said, didn't really do the right thing. But how do we redirect our lives, or use as an example, um, an inspiration to go, well, I do want to be a little Christ, I do want to follow Jesus, I do want to take God's instruction to heart. And see where that leads us.

Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, we're just about to run out of time here, so I quickly want to let everyone know, and we will have links in the show notes, so when this releases, you should be able to just go to show notes and click right on the link. We'll make it as easy as we can. But at andrew-grier.com, because this is a pre-order currently, people can go and they can get a couple of different options to pre-order this book. One is a physical bundle and one is a digital bundle. Would you be able to just quickly tell us in a minute or less, if possible, uh, just about those two bundles and what's available there?

Yes, my website will be the only place right now outside of book events to get a signed copy. So that, of course, it's a hardback copy of the book, the first copies of it signed. And then the digital bundle also includes 3 lessons that are exclusive to the pre-order, actual audio lessons of President Carter teaching some of these lessons, which includes much more material than was edited down into the chapter, includes a lot more of his kind of storytelling and sharing about his life, which he always does in introduction to the Sunday school lesson. That's a digital bundle. The physical bundle also includes a DVD of Plainspoken, which is the only place you can get the final solo interview of President Carter's life, which we were able to, to have as a part of the documentary. And then it also includes a wonderful piece of artwork of kind of folk art by an artist here in Plains in Sumter County that was made when President Carter passed away. A really beautiful, colorful piece of art, a signed print of that. So that's what's available. And actually, an easy thing, Rick, is you can go to sundayswithjimmycarter.com. You can either go to my website or that, but sundayswithjimmycarter.com, which is the tagline of the book, will get you to that book landing page and the trailer and all the pre-orders.

Great. Well, Andrew, thank you for sharing not only about President Carter's legacy, but also about your own journey. I really— I loved hearing about your story and your move to Plains. So thank you for that today.

Yeah, sure.

And, and so for listeners, I just— just a reminder, you can look up More Than a President: Sundays with Jimmy Carter wherever books are sold. You can preorder it. But I really want to highly recommend that you go preorder it through Andrew so you can get those bonus things and autograph material. And I'm looking forward to getting a copy too. I want to hear some of those audio things, you know, straight from his mouth. I'd love to hear that. So, and I do want to encourage everybody to download the PBS app if you don't have it, and you can go there and watch Plainspoken right now. It is available. And so thank you again for, for, I think this is maybe your fourth time on, on Voices in My Head, Andrew. So thank you as always, for being one of the voices in my head this week.

Thanks, Rick.