The Table Church DC

Remember group projects? There was the partner who vanished, the one who did all the work, and the crush that made everything complicated. Community can feel the same way: a room full of people you didn't pick and can't control. So what do you do when belonging gets messy? Kicking off our fall series Hot Takes, [Preacher] opens Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. That was a small, status...

Ever had a big, dramatic moment — a decision, a promise, a "this changes everything" instant — that didn't actually change much? Pastor Tonetta opens with a story about the most intense altar call of her life, and what her body remembers isn't the music, it's the fear of being surrounded and pressured to prove she'd "been saved." From there, she asks a harder question: what if real commitment was...

Every community has a guest list — and every guest list has an unspoken logic about who makes the cut. Tochi digs into why we default to inviting people who already look, think, and live like us, and what gets lost when we do. Using Encanto's "We don't talk about Bruno" and Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer as entry points, Tochi traces a throughline: families, institutions, and even religious spaces...

Why do so many of us secretly believe there are things we're not allowed to want — a school, a job, a kind of joy — because of who we are? Antonio unpacks how internalized limits get planted early, and how they quietly run our lives long after we've "made it." Drawing on his own story — from a debate opponent who couldn't picture him in college, to strangers who couldn't picture him as a lawyer —...

Remember 2020? The marches, the black squares, the sense that everything was about to change? Six years later, a lot of that momentum has quietly faded back into business as usual. This episode sits with an uncomfortable question: what's the real difference between what we say we believe and what we actually do with our time, our bodies, our money? Pastor Tonetta draws on an unexpected pairing — a...

We're taught that changing the world costs everything: burning out, giving until it hurts, treating joy as a distraction from the work that actually matters. But what if that's backwards? Drawing on two one-paragraph parables from the Gospels, Octavia Butler's Earthseed novels, and — unexpectedly — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this sermon unpacks how "sacrifice" gets weaponized to keep unjust systems...

In the summer of 1969, two completely different visions of the future played out at the same time — one aimed at the moon, the other rooted in a Harlem park packed with people who'd rather celebrate together than watch a flag get planted 250,000 miles away. This episode uses that split screen to unpack an old, uncomfortable story about ten bridesmaids, a late groom, and a locked door. Some of the...

There's an old story about a rich man who feasts every day while a man named Lazarus lies hungry right outside his gate. The rich man knows his name. He still does nothing. Trevor Went pairs that story with Octavia Butler's time-travel novel Kindred to ask a question that's harder to answer than it sounds: are you guarding the gate, or willing to break it open? This isn't about distant injustice —...

Ever feel resentful when someone else gets a break you had to earn the hard way? This episode digs into why rest, time, and success can feel like a competition — and why that instinct might be lying to us. Pastor Heidi uses a 2,000-year-old story about day laborers getting paid unfairly (or so it seems) alongside Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower to unpack how scarcity gets wired into our brai...

We're living in what feels like a dystopian novel — and Octavia Butler saw it coming in 1993. Her Parable of the Sower imagined a world of climate collapse, privatized towns, and a politician promising to "make America great again." When the future feels foreclosed, who gets to imagine what comes next? This message pairs Butler's Afrofuturism with what may have been Jesus' first parable: a farmer...

Description: Most of us were handed a set of rules about sex before we were ever given a framework for thinking about it — and for many people, especially those raised in religious communities, those rules came wrapped in shame, fear, and silence. The damage is real, well-documented, and affects far more people than the church tends to admit. In this sermon, Bekki reexamines a familiar Bible story...

Most of us want the benefits of community — safety, belonging, mutual support — but bristle at the friction that actual community requires. This sermon confronts that tension directly: why do we wait until we're "rich enough" to give, and what does it really cost to be part of something? Pastor Anthony explores an ancient letter where a broke, disaster-stricken community begged to be allowed to gi...

Most of us carry more than we realize — not just stuff, but the anxiety that comes with it. The drive to accumulate, to secure, to hold on tight isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when we build our sense of self on things that can be taken away. In this sermon, Pastor Tonetta explores what it looks like to locate your identity somewhere other than your possessions — drawing on stories from...

What if one of the most important things we're carrying is something we forgot we had? In this week's installment of "Everything We Carry," Matt opens up 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12 to talk about spiritual gifts — the ones we've buried, the ones we're nervous to use, and the ones that still work even after years in the bottom of the bag. He names the wounds many of us carry from places where th...

Most of us learned that power means control — over people, outcomes, situations. But what if that definition is exactly what's breaking us, and breaking the world around us? Preached by Pastor Tonetta, this sermon uses the story of Antoinette Tuff — a bookkeeper who talked down an armed gunman using nothing but honesty and presence — alongside the Pentecost narrative to reframe what power actually...

Most of us know we have some form of privilege — racial, economic, positional — but knowing it and actually doing something with it are very different things. What do you do with the guilt? The discomfort? The uncertainty about whether listening and learning is enough? Elder Daniel explores the story of Pharaoh's daughter — a woman defined entirely by the dominant system around her — and what it l...

We all carry things we don't talk about — grief, shame, exhaustion, ambivalence about money and power. Most of us walk into rooms and put on our composure, because that's what we've been taught is acceptable. But what happens when the weight of it finally has to land somewhere? Pastor Tonetta draws on Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' and the book of Nehemiah to make a case that you can't re...

You check your phone every 47 seconds. You say yes to everything and mean none of it. You refresh the news looking for a sign that something has finally gotten better. Somewhere in all of that, your actual life is happening — and nobody's really there for it. This week, Pastor Anthony looks at a moment where Jesus' closest friends ask exactly the wrong question, and what it reveals about where our...

How do you keep living your regular life when the news is genuinely catastrophic? It's not denial — it's one of the most disorienting feelings of our moment. This week Pastor Anthony Parrott sits with that tension and refuses to offer an easy answer.   Drawing on a post-resurrection story most people overlook, he makes a case that small, ordinary acts — a meal, a text, showing up sad and confused...

What if the deepest problem isn't your worst habits or biggest failures — but your fear of death? And what if that fear is quietly behind almost every way we hurt ourselves and each other? In this Easter sermon, Pastor Toneta Landisina draws on the story of Lazarus to reframe resurrection as liberation rather than sentimentality. She unpacks why scapegoating holds entire societies hostage, why "we...

When things feel out of control, most of us do one of two things: we retreat to what's familiar, or we come out swinging. But what if both of those instincts are actually traps — and there's a harder, stranger option that history keeps proving actually works? In this sermon, Pastor Anthony traces a thread from an ancient prophet to a Berlin prayer service that helped bring down a wall, asking what...

What do you do when everything around you is collapsing — your community, your faith, your sense of home — and someone tells you to act like it's going to be okay? That's the tension at the heart of this talk, and it's not a hypothetical. It's the question Jeremiah faced in a jail cell while his city was under siege. Trevor Wentt draws on the story of Jeremiah buying land he had no business buying...

Something is wrong, and a lot of us are carrying it alone. Whether it's personal loss, political exhaustion, or the weight of watching your community get hurt — grief has a way of isolating us exactly when we need each other most. In this sermon, Toochi Ngwangwa draws on the book of Jeremiah to make a case for grief as something meant to be shared out loud. From Jewish Shiva to New Orleans jazz fu...

What do you do when you've hardened — when grief, exhaustion, or the weight of the world has calcified something in you that used to feel things? This sermon sits with one of the oldest questions in the Bible: what happens to a relationship when one person walks away, and the other won't stop asking why? Drawing from the book of Jeremiah and a surprising reread of Ephesians, Anthony Parrott traces...

What do you do when something breaks and can't be fixed? Not reshaped — actually shattered. Most of us build entire identities around those moments, and then spend years living inside the story we made up about what the breaking meant. Preached by Anthony Parrott, this sermon holds two truths at once: some things genuinely can't go back to what they were, and that's not the end. Drawing from the p...