After 40 years in political exile, Jimmy Carter is still a preacher at heart

PLAINS, Ga. — They had come to this small town and slept in their cars and then woke up to scrub themselves with baby wipes and stand in line in the soft early morning light, amid a thick ground fog that shrouded the trees.

Once inside, they were instructed not to cheer or applaud when the teacher came in. He doesn’t like that sort of adulation.

So, when the moment arrived, rather abruptly and without warning, a charge went through the room. But instead of exploding into noise, all the energy remained suspended in place.

“Good morning, everybody.” Those were the first words that Jimmy Carter uttered as he entered the sanctuary of Maranatha Baptist Church, interrupting the church’s head pastor, the Rev. Tony Lowden, who was midsentence.

Carter’s voice was still strong and clear. And then there he was, with a hitch in his step and using a cane to walk as a result of the broken hip he had suffered just two months earlier. But at 94 years old — the longest-living president in American history — he moved with as much purpose as ever.

Audience members responded to Carter’s greeting with their own salutations but then fell quiet as he shuffled across the front of the room. Once he was seated, Carter asked those in the packed room where they were from and cracked a joke or two. And then he launched into his lesson, talking about his own struggles to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with that of the New, and then about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.

The room of sleep-deprived, unwashed pilgrims sat quietly, at rapt attention, hungry to hear.

It was hope. And goodness. That’s what so many people who had come and slept in cramped quarters in their cars were looking for.

“At this point in our history, we are lacking moral integrity and leadership in our political system. … I wanted to be reminded that that still exists and it will exist again,” said Keegan Kautzky, a 35-year-old agricultural program developer, who had arrived around 3 a.m. two weeks earlier and slept in his car, only to find out the next morning that he would be in the overflow room.

This time he arrived around 6 p.m. on Saturday, slept once again in the passenger seat of his sedan and ended up in the second row.