In this final episode (at least for this season), Jon sits down with Pastor Joanne to reflect on the podcast: what they’ve appreciated, what surprised them, and why creating space for thoughtful, open-ended conversation still matters. They talk about the role of curiosity in faith, the tension of not having easy answers, and what it looks like to carry these kinds of conversations forward into whatever comes next.

Springtime walks to and from the bus are among my favorites. That’s especially true when there’s time enough in my schedule to pause along the way: taking-in the emerging blossoms on trees and in the flowerbeds my neighbors tend so well. I greet these April blooms in the way some do when they encounter long-lost friends: a slight gasp and a broad smile, then the stage-whisper, “it’s been too long” as I stand there, still, taking in the dear sight.

In this season of awakening, I remember the words of Pablo Neruda who in his poem “Keeping Quiet” once mused:

“Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.”

Ah, yes. Earth’s stillness before the spring flowering lures many into believing that nothing is happening or that everything really is dead. Yet, time and sun and rain combine to urge into sight what has been growing within and underground. This magnificence unfolds so beautifully in nature all around us!

I believe it can emerge within us as well.

Since December 2023, Gethsemane Lutheran Church has rooted around, searching out new ways of connecting through a podcast and substack articles. We’ve invited listeners to explore with us “the rituals that shape our existence, and the faith that infuses meaning into our journey.” Throughout this time, Jon McClung has led these explorations – inviting us all to consider our lives in connection to one another and to the world as it unfolds around us. We’ve thought together about difficult moments in the American story as we struggle against Christian Nationalism and we’ve wondered together about hope, harm, and the work of becoming. We’ve considered life in community and emphasized the value of self-compassion within that community. We’ve acknowledged moments of being enraged and exhausted.

This has been an expedition: a purposeful exploration undertaken together. Today I write in celebration of what we have explored. By Jon’s guiding, together we have arrived at new understandings about many questions and, I hope, new understandings of the place of questions in our lives.

Jon has now moved into a new role working as Intergenerational and Community Ministry Director at Poulsbo First Lutheran Church. In turn, Gethsemane is pausing our Rhythms of Humanity podcast.

As with the slow, hidden work of the natural world regenerating in what looks like a “dead time,” we are committed to this pause. We need to explore what is possible and what is useful; what could enrich and what may deplete. As Gethsemane considers what’s next, we welcome feedback on what the podcast has been and could be.

There’s something almost uncomfortable about Palm Sunday when you slow down enough to notice what’s actually happening. The crowd is looking for a king in the way they’ve always understood kings: power, control, overthrow. They shout “Hosanna” (save us) with real hope, but it’s a hope shaped by their own expectations. It’s almost like they’re not just welcoming Jesus – they’re projecting onto him. And when he doesn’t become the type of king they imagined, that same energy turns.

The crowd wasn’t wrong to hope. They were naming something real: the world as it is isn’t the world as it should be. We’re all very familiar with that feeling. And when people sense something is off – when power feels unchecked and systems feel too heavy – there’s a natural response. People show up. They push back. They hope for something different.

You can see that same instinct playing out right now. This weekend, people are gathering for “No Kings” rallies – not because they have everything figured out, but because something in them recognizes that the world shouldn’t work this way.

I love that this rally is happening on the weekend of Palm Sunday. These events reveal that people still care and still hope for things to change. But I think Palm Sunday also gently pushes us one step further. Because while the original crowd had similar issues, they didn’t yet understand how Jesus would respond. They expected power to defeat power. Control to overthrow control.

But Jesus does something different. He refuses to play that game. He doesn’t take power – he redefines it. He doesn’t dominate – he serves. He doesn’t crush opposition – he absorbs it and keeps loving anyway.

So maybe the invitation isn’t to step back from moments like this, but to step into them more deeply. To hold onto that same energy – the hope, the resistance, the desire for something better – and to let it be shaped by a different kind of vision.

Not just “no kings”… but a deeper question: What kind of world are we actually hoping for, and how can we build that together?

Because it’s in moments like these – in rallies like “No Kings,” in communities where people show up for one another, in places where neighbors stand alongside neighbors – that we might just be catching glimpses of God’s dream breaking through.

For a lot of my life, I’ve watched people use scripture in ways that felt out of place. A verse gets pulled out of the Bible and dropped into a conversation to prove some point that has almost nothing to do with the original story. The argument can be clever, sometimes even impressive. But it always feels like a stretch – like bending the text until it finally says what someone wants it to say.

So today, I hope I’m not doing the same thing. But there’s a moment in the Gospel of John that I can’t shake. It’s when Pontius Pilate is questioning Jesus, and at one point Pilate asks a simple question: “What is truth?”

And then Pilate does something strange. He doesn’t wait for an answer. Which makes me wonder if the question was ever really about truth in the first place.

That line has been echoing in my mind lately, because it feels like a question hanging in the air all around us right now. What is truth?

In our current political moment, truth often feels slippery. Facts get disputed. Narratives compete. Everyone claims to have the real version of events, and the noise just keeps getting louder. It’s exhausting.

If I’m honest, it’s made me hungry for something more solid than arguments and talking points. I want someone to tell the truth – the kind of truth that doesn’t depend on who shouts the loudest or who has the most power behind them.

That’s what makes Pilate’s question so haunting. In the story, the question isn’t asked by someone seeking truth. It’s asked by someone managing a political situation. I don’t think Pilate is trying to discover what’s real. He’s trying to keep the peace, avoid a riot, and survive the moment.

Truth is inconvenient for people in power. And that part of the story feels uncomfortably familiar.

But the truth is, the temptation to avoid truth isn’t just a political problem. It’s a human one. And, right now, that part of the story feels uncomfortably close to home.

It’s easy to see where someone else is lying. It’s much harder to see where I might be lying to myself. Most of us don’t twist reality in obvious ways. We do it in quieter ones. We ignore certain facts. We tell ourselves stories that make our side look better. We assume the worst about people we disagree with and the best about the people who already think like we do. Little distortions that make the world easier to live in.

Maybe that’s why Pilate’s question still feels so relevant. “What is truth?” Not as a philosophical puzzle or a political slogan. But as a question each of us has to sit with – especially when the honest answer might challenge the stories we’ve been telling ourselves.

After all, the search for truth doesn’t really begin with exposing someone else’s lies. It begins with the courage to face our own.

In this episode, we step back and ask a deeper question. When scripture is used to justify war, what is faith actually supposed to look like? We reflect on anger, overwhelm, and the misuse of scripture before a conversation about compassion, resistance, and what people of faith are called to do when violence is carried out in God’s name.

I’ve started hearing a familiar idea again. Whenever tensions rise in the Middle East, someone inevitably says it: This could be a sign of the end times.

The reasoning is predictable. Ancient biblical passages mention the region, wars, and nations rising against nations. Connect a few dots between those verses and today’s headlines, and suddenly missile strikes start looking like pieces of a divine puzzle.

For some people, there’s even a strange excitement in that possibility. As if history might finally be reaching its dramatic conclusion. Which is totally disturbing. For the people living under the bombs, it doesn’t feel like prophecy. It feels like funerals. It feels like parents trying to keep their children calm while sirens echo through the night.

I understand that when the world feels unstable, we want chaos to fit into a larger plan. If war is part of God’s design, then at least the destruction has a purpose – right?! But that way of thinking carries a dangerous side effect. If violence is part of God’s script, maybe war stops being something we wrestle with and becomes something we accept.

The central story of Christianity isn’t about conquering enemies. It’s about someone refusing to. Someone who rejected violence even when violence might have protected him. Someone who insisted that loving your neighbor includes the people you’ve been taught to hate. So when Christians start treating war like confirmation that God’s plan is unfolding, I can’t help but wonder what story they think they’re following.

Wars are not ancient riddles waiting to be decoded. They are decisions. They grow out of fear, ambition, pride, and power. Every generation convinces itself that this war will finally solve things, and overwhelming force will bring peace. History has been running that experiment for thousands of years, and the results are not encouraging.

I don’t believe wars are signs of Jesus’ second coming. But they do reveal something about us. How quickly fear narrows our imagination. How easily we divide the world into heroes and villains. How tempting it is to believe that destruction might somehow solve problems.

Faith, at its best, pushes in another direction. It refuses to turn human suffering into a theological talking point. And it insists on remembering something very simple: Every person caught in the crossfire belongs to someone.

When you remember that, war stops looking like prophecy and starts looking like tragedy.

Growing up, a lot of faith was theoretical to me. I was taught about loving my neighbor, caring for people on the margins, and trusting that God stands with the oppressed. I believed it all, but I didn’t feel the weight of it. I was insulated from most of the consequences those words carry in real life.

Somewhere along the way, the world got closer. Or perhaps more honestly, I just woke up. Now, as the system tries to close the door on a beloved family in our community, it no longer feels like an issue to debate. It feels like people we know and love. People whose fear is no longer theoretical to me.

I’m trying to figure out where my faith sits in the middle of all this. Instinctively, I reach for the phrases I was given:

“God is in control.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “We just have to trust.”

But standing in this moment, those words feel thin. They were meant to reassure, but in practice they dismissed.

If “God is in control” means God willed this outcome, I don’t believe that. If “everything happens for a reason” means suffering is divinely scripted, I can’t accept that. And if “just trust” means don’t ask hard questions, then that kind of trust feels more like avoidance than faith.

I’ve been wrestling with how to explain what I feel, and this is where I’ve landed:

God is not the author of this denial. God is not hiding inside bureaucratic language. God is not pulling strings behind courtroom doors.

But I do believe God is here. In the trembling after the phone call. In the anger that rises because something feels wrong. In the silence that settles when there are no easy answers. And maybe most clearly – in the community that refuses to walk away.

I don’t think God needs any more defenders or spokespersons right now – just people who will embody God’s nearness.

If we believe God stands with the oppressed, then that belief doesn’t live in slogans. It lives in proximity. It lives in showing up. It lives in the decision to stay connected when the outcome hurts.

When the system says no, the church does not get to retreat into abstraction. We stay. We listen. We carry what we can.

Not because we are certain how this will end, but because love does not require a guaranteed outcome to remain faithful.

When the Seahawks won the Super Bowl this past Sunday, I had a brief moment of deeply questionable theology. I found myself wondering if God decided to answer the prayers of Seahawks fans over those of Patriots fans. Which, if we’re being honest, feels fair. They’ve had plenty of chances to celebrate.

I pictured God sitting somewhere beyond time and space, listening patiently as millions of requests came in. “Please let the Seahawks win.” “Please let the Patriots win.” And God just sighing and saying, “I cannot do another Patriots parade. I simply cannot.”

Of course, I don’t actually believe God picks football teams. That would raise a lot of uncomfortable follow-up questions. Like why didn’t God intervene during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLIX? Is God making up for that painful memory? You know, the one they made Seahawks fans watch on repeat over the last two weeks.

All of this reveals something deeply honest about sports fans. The moment the game gets close, everyone becomes just a little bit religious. People who haven’t stepped foot in a church since 2007 suddenly sit perfectly still, afraid that moving might disrupt something cosmic. As if God is up there thinking, “I was going to help, but then you went to the fridge.”

We don’t actually think we’re controlling the outcome. But we also don’t stop hoping like it matters. Because when something is completely outside our control, hope seems like the only participation left.

For those three hours on February 8th, the other things people were carrying loosened their grip. Bills were still due. Diagnoses were still real. The world was still heavy in all the ways it has been heavy lately. But joy showed up anyway.

That’s the strange, beautiful thing about joy. It doesn’t wait for permission. It doesn’t wait until everything is fixed. It just arrives. In living rooms and crowded bars. In the quiet disbelief that settles in when something you hoped for actually happens.

For a few hours, people believed together. Strangers high-fived. Entire neighborhoods exhaled at the same time. It didn’t solve anything permanent. But it reminded people that good things can still happen, even in the middle of everything else. And that reminder has a way of reaching further than the game itself.

I don’t think God chose the Seahawks. But I do believe God is present anywhere people remember how to hope. Anywhere people remember how to celebrate. Anywhere people remember that joy is still possible, even in the middle of everything else.

Not because God takes sides, but because God is present among us all. In the joy. In the disappointment. In the living rooms filled with celebration, and in the quiet rooms where people wished for a different ending.

Even with Patriots fans who longed for a different outcome.

One of my favorite books is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. In it, he looks back on the 1960s from the early ’70s – after the assassinations, after Vietnam… After the bright optimism had begun to fade. He remembers the dream of the ’60s as a “high and beautiful wave,” a sense of momentum that felt like inevitable victory. But standing on a steep hill in Las Vegas, he can suddenly see the “high-water mark” – the exact place where the wave broke and began to roll back. He describes it like a surfer realizing that the water is no longer carrying him forward, only home.

Lately, I’ve thought a lot about what Hunter was describing, hoping to see the highwater mark of white Christian nationalism break and start to roll back. This morning I was on my way to run an errand when I passed hundreds of high-school aged kids outside with signs, chanting about ICE, about families, about immigrant neighbors belonging. Backpacks on the ground. Homemade posters. It was a moment that gave me a boost of energy and optimism.

I’m not saying that was a crest – I’m suspicious of tidy turning points. History almost never sends a calendar invite that says, “Today the story changes.” But something is moving that wasn’t moving a month ago. People who were quiet are finding their voices. People who felt alone are discovering how many neighbors were standing in the same fear.

For years the loudest version of Christianity in America has sounded like a clenched fist: white, certain, allergic to grace, and baptized in nationalism. It has felt unstoppable at times. And yet the kids on the sidewalk this morning didn’t look defeated. They looked like a beginning I didn’t order and can’t control.

I don’t want to romanticize it. The machinery of harm is still real. Policies still have teeth. Families are still scared. A wave can crest and still do damage on the way out.

I’m simply naming something that gave me hope, and I’m starting to wonder if the tide is turning. And if it is, the question won’t be whether we saw it coming. The question will be whether we chose to stand on the shore, or to step in and help the water turn.

I don’t say this lightly, but this upcoming Give. Share. Eat. feels especially important.

Most of the good that keeps the world from tipping over doesn’t look dramatic.
It doesn’t arrive with bold statements or sweeping solutions. More often, it looks like people quietly choosing to show up – doing work that matters, even when it goes unnoticed.

As we’ve seen in Minnesota, it’s going to take all of us to keep the world from tipping over. And there is a way to make an immediate, tangible impact.

Right now, some of our immigrant neighbors are avoiding food pantries – not because they don’t need help, but because they’re afraid. Afraid of being questioned. Afraid of being noticed. Afraid that simply trying to feed their families could pull them into systems that feel hostile and unpredictable.

Through trusted relationships and community networks, we have ways to get food to people safely. No strings attached.

This is a critical part of how we push back. Outrage alone isn’t enough – we also need care that refuses to disappear. We need people who decide that fear will not be the loudest voice shaping our community.

Give. Share. Eat. isn’t going to fix immigration policy or solve injustice this weekend. What it asks instead is something quieter and more stubborn: the conviction that our immigrant neighbors matter, and that no one should have to choose between hunger and safety.

This work isn’t flashy. It’s hairnets and measuring cups. Assembly lines and teamwork. It’s people giving 2.5 hours of their time to make sure someone else is fed.

If you’ve been watching the world and wishing you could do something – here’s a chance.

Sign up. Show up. Be part of the ordinary heroism that tells our neighbors, without conditions or qualifiers: you matter, and you are not alone.