The Middle Way

The Middle Way talks quitting, giving up, leaving, and resigning. God not only gives us permission to rest, but commands us to do it. After two and a half years and 33 episodes, the Middle Way says goodbye (or, maybe, see you later). 

Bonus Episode! Eric reflects on the sacrament of Baptism. 

It takes time and energy to show up for one another. On this episode, we welcome our dear friend and companion on the journey, Hannah Early Gerjol, to talk about the challenge of making new friends, maintaining friendships across time and space, and breaking up with friends. 

One of the most frequent phrases in the Bible is, “do not be afraid!” Jesus and the prophets say it over and over again. It's a nice sentiment, but it is repeated so much because God is calling us to things that are, actually, scary. The Middle Way explores fear entering the human experience in Genesis 2-3, a faithful response to fear, and why we should pray for courage.

Christians say that the Trinity is so mysterious, but what if it has the most practical implication for our lives? What if God is not an individual, but a community?

The Middle Way welcomes Rev. Paul Witmer into a playful and intimate conversation on addiction and substance use. Paul is a pastor in the United Church of Christ, a spiritual director, and is currently in ministry with incarcerated women at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women. We talk about recovery, attachments, numbing, and the practice of noticing.

Hannah and Eric talk with Father Zebulun Treloar about God, gender identity, and the Holy Spirit's boundary-breaking call to reframe who belongs. 

The first week of Easter collides with Earth Day⁠—a joyous celebration, but an urgent one. Eric penned an op-ed encouraging us to practice resurrection and we are dropping his words as a special Easter message. 

We talk with Rev. Leanna Coyle-Carr on Jesus' radical generosity, the art and skill of hospitality, and the relationship Jesus initiated by giving us the gift of bread and wine.

The Middle Way welcomes esteemed guest Kim Jackson, Episcopal priest and State Senator, to the podcast to dialogue about Jesus' parable of the prodigal son and the radical hospitality he modeled by eating with sinners.

In a three-part series on Fasting + Feasting The Middle Way explores Lent through the lens of food and faith. With Ash Wednesday upon us, many Christians decide to abstain or give something up for 40 days. Where does this practice come from and how can we reclaim fasting as a communal refocusing that honors our bodies and our relationships? 

The Middle Way welcomes esteemed guest Nick Pickrell—activist, pastor, actor, and musician in Kansas City—to explore Jesus' Sermon on the Plain, experiencing cognitive dissonance in our faith lives, and the Catholic Worker Movement. Together we wrestle with Jesus' teachings on faith, poverty, and Christian community. Living into our faith often means moving from dissonance to deconstruction. We must have the courage to stand back and ask why?

1 Corinthians 13 is one of the most recognizable passages in the New Testament. Used frequently as a wedding text, this seemingly romantic ode is far more far-reaching and complex than your average wedding sermon. While lyrically and aesthetically beautiful, Paul's words weren't affirming a way of life the Corinthians were already living out. It was a call to action. It was an instruction on how the community might disarm discord and move into the future. In this episode, Hannah and Eric reconsider and reclaim Paul's letter and put it in conversation with the recent birth of their son. 

Happy Christmas, Middle Way listeners. God is with us! Host, Eric Rucker, shares his Christmas Eve sermon reminding us that the light of God breaks through the darkness. 

To deprogram our prayer life is to reconsider what we have been taught about prayer and open ourselves to new ways of being in relationship with God. Jesus and scripture are not pushing us to pray more in order to please God, or check a box, or feel righteous. Rather, the idea is to move from seeing prayer as an isolated practice we do five minutes a day (or only on Sundays during a worship service) to seeing it as a way of being that pervades our entire active life.

Formal etiquette tells us we shouldn't talk about sex, politics, or religion in polite company. But here at the Middle Way, those are the things we want to talk about most!This month's conversation features a frank and fun conversation on the intersection between sexuality and spirituality. We invite two remarkable guests to discuss their personal and professional journeys of integrating these things into their life and work. 

The world we inhabit values certainty, answers, and plans. We view uncertainty as weakness. Sometimes, even, we use Jesus to create a fortress that keeps chaos out. We use the Bible and our Christian tradition to uphold an iron curtain of certainty. But what if, as people of faith, the point is not to grow in certainty and surety? What if we are meant to grow into a healthier relationship with uncertainty? This month the Middle Way explores all the things we don't know yet, how to hold our unknowing compassionately, and how uncertainty can lead to generativity.

The Middle Way kicks off Season 2 with special guest Dr. Elizabeth Corrie and a conversation on Jesus' nonviolent campaign, the difference between nonviolence and passivity, and how ordinary people can commit to nonviolent struggle. 

Hannah and Eric talk about the warning signs we experience that remind us to rest, what they learned from the last year, and how to balance action & contemplation to live our healthiest, most faithful lives. Episode 14 is the end of the beginning. The Middle Way will return in September with Season 2! 

In Pentecost, Christians often talk about the gift of the Holy Spirit. But it's important to remember that the Spirit came like the rush of a violent wind, not as a cooing white dove. What does this mean for Christians today? The Middle Way talks with Dr. Angela Cowser on the gift of anger within our Christian faith—how we can embrace it, what we can learn from our biblical tradition, and the power of anger as we work for love & justice. 

How do we pattern our lives toward resurrection? This episode explores St. Benedict's Rule of Life and how spiritual practices and rhythms can nurture the growth of our whole selves, our communities, and our relationship with the earth and our neighbors. 

Easter Egg (Bonus Content): We comprised this lil' jam as an Eastertide gift because we love you all. And because we really need some worship music that we can actually dance to, right? God is Risen, friends! 

Resurrection isn't easy—and it isn't a one-time event. Jesus returned wounded and scarred. Rolling away the tombs of our pain, our past, our dysfunction, and our complicity in the death-dealing nature of our collective pain takes time and it takes work. This isn't a shallow hallelujah that we sing. Hannah & Eric discuss John 20:19-31, The Disabled God by Nancy Eiesland, and share their own resurrection stories. 

As we journey this Holy Week, walking with Jesus toward death, we carry all of our grief—the pain, the loss, and the tombs of our life and experience. There cannot be a real Easter without a real Holy Saturday before it.  Let us resist rushing toward resurrection and sit with each other. 

We talk intersectionality, the queer experience, and the queerness of faith with the Rev. Tyler Sit. Tyler is a church planter and United Methodist pastor living in Minneapolis. His first book, Stay Awake: The Gospel for Changemakers, will be released on April 6, 2021. 

In the first of a two-part series, the Middle Way turns Lent upside down and inside out. Queering Lent Pt. 1 invites the Rev. Dr. Janet Everhart into a discussion on reading scripture with a queer lens and what it means to engage a theology that disrupts the status quo. 

In Epiphany, we celebrate that God showed up—and that God shows up to those we might not expect. The magi were seers and seekers. They followed stars and interpreted dreams. They were racially and religiously different from Jesus, and yet they were the first to have an epiphany about what God was up to. Episode 7 offers an invitation to look to the wisdom of the magi and resist the ruthlessness of Herod.

We've made a sharp transition into the season of Advent—a season of preparation where we await the birth of Jesus and prepare for God to be reborn into our hearts. In a year where it feels like we've been in a period of waiting for eight months or more, we pack the words of Meister Eckhart and the energy & guidance of Mary into our spiritual go bags as we move into this season of preparation. 

Amidst the haunted season of Halloween, a looming election, and mainline church decline, the Middle Way offers a spooky reflection on the death of Moses and the adaptive leadership required to press on. 

Vocation is multi-faceted. We put it together like puzzle pieces: in careers, romantic relationships, our free time, our children, or a million other facets of our lives. Sometimes we do one thing to pay the bills so that we can do another thing for free that makes our souls sing. Sometimes vocational discernment is a wilderness experience. We wander, we wonder, we complain to God wishing we could go back. 

As people of faith, it is difficult to grapple with the humanity and humility of Jesus. But there is Good News in this humanity. Perhaps God knows what it is like to make mistakes and to need repentance. 

This conversation puts the parables of Jesus in conversation with poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry as we take a hard look at the work of the church today. Jesus' parables should not affirm us in our complacency; they should disturb us into action. 

In the life of faith, how do we live with urgency but not hurry? As Christians, we are called to be people who are tired of waiting. We are also called to repent of our frenzied hurry and our glorification of productivity. This conversation explores the life and ministry of Jesus, the poetry of Marie Howe, and the activism of Dorothy Day as we make sense of how to live into Ordinary Time during a season that is anything but ordinary. 

The Middle Way is a way of being within the Christian tradition. It isn't moderation or relativism or bourgeois restraint. Rather, it's a disciplined holding together of intricate realities, of thinking critically while honoring mystery, of being committed to justice without being a dick, of being honest enough to despair and crazy enough to hope. Join us as we discover the intersections between our everyday lives and the liturgical seasons.