WASHINGTON (RNS) — A prestigious group of mourners, including a slate of current, former and future presidents and vice presidents, assembled in the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday (Jan. 9) for the state funeral of President Jimmy Carter, celebrating the life and legacy of the peanut farmer-turned-politician from Plains, Georgia.
Carter’s casket, which had been lying in state at the U.S. Capitol since Tuesday evening, was welcomed at the door of the snow-covered cathedral by Episcopal prelates including the Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington.
“Let us also pray for all who mourn that they may cast their care on God and know the consolation of his love,” Budde prayed from the Book of Common Prayer, her robes billowing in a frigid wind.
A short time later, President Joe Biden offered his eulogy for Carter. The president noted that when Carter ran for national office in 1976, then-Sen. Biden was among the first to endorse his candidacy. Biden said he was drawn to what he called Carter’s “most enduring attribute: character, character, character.”
Biden, like many who spoke at the state funeral, highlighted the importance of Carter’s faith, saying it overlapped with broadly held American ideals, including that “we all are created equal in the image of God.”
“Jimmy held a deep Christian faith in God … faith as a substance of things hoped for and evidence of the things not seen,” Biden said. “Faith founded on commandments of Scripture: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy soul, and love thy neighbor as thyself. Easy to say, very, very difficult to do.”
The spoken tributes to Carter, which included eulogies written by Carter’s predecessor and his vice president and delivered posthumously on their behalf, were interspersed with music. In a testament to Carter’s long life and broad spectrum of allies, both the living and the dead shared reflections on a legacy of leadership, which one eulogist referred to as “a miracle.”
Besides “Amazing Grace” and the U.S. Navy hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” — Carter was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate — the crowd heard a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.
Looking on somberly from the front pews were Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and recently reelected Donald Trump. Several of their spouses, including Melania Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were also in attendance, as was former Vice President Mike Pence, who served under Trump, and current Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost her own presidential bid in November. Seated nearby were foreign dignitaries, such as Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, the brother of King Charles III, and Justin Trudeau, outgoing prime minister of Canada.
Joshua Carter, Jimmy Carter’s grandson, first addressed the gathering from the pulpit, recounting the late president’s history of teaching Sunday school — a tradition, he said, that began when Carter served in the Navy before his classes became a fixture of his time at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, a Cooperative Baptist Church where thousands have come to hear his weekly lessons. (A longtime Southern Baptist, Carter left the denomination in 2000).
Carter, who died at age 100 as the longest-lived U.S. president, had outlived many of his contemporaries. As a result, sections of the program were delivered by their descendants. Steven Ford, President Gerald Ford’s son, read a tribute his late father wrote about Carter, detailing the warm friendship the two forged over the years despite being rivals in the 1976 election.
“God did a good thing when he made your dad,” Ford said to Carter’s children sitting in the front of the cathedral.
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