The Table Church DC

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...

Most of us have learned to protect ourselves from pain by shutting down — closing off, going through the motions, settling for less than we actually want. It works, until it doesn't. This sermon asks a harder question: what happens when the numbness that kept you safe starts keeping you stuck? Drawing from an ancient text written by and for people whose entire world had collapsed, and yes, The Lio...

Many of us carry complicated feelings about prayer — maybe it was weaponized against us, maybe it felt hollow, or maybe we prayed hard for something and got silence in return. This episode sits with that tension honestly, without rushing past it. Antonio Ingram explores what prayer actually looks like when you stop performing and start showing up as you are — scared, angry, lonely, in pain. Drawin...

You've been showing up, doing the work, trying to live with integrity—and the results aren't there. Policies get worse. People leave. Relationships fracture. So you're left with a brutal question: Is any of this actually worth it? This sermon explores the prophet Jeremiah, who preached justice for 23 years and saw zero measurable success. Through his story and the words of Martin Luther King Jr.,...

When the ground beneath our feet feels unstable, how do we stay true to ourselves while adapting to a world that keeps shifting? Many of us know what it's like to recognize that the practices that once grounded us no longer feel sufficient—or worse, they deliver us back into shame and uncertainty. This sermon explores an obscure biblical community called the Rechabites, who mastered what we desper...

Does the future feel inevitable to you? With authoritarianism, deportations, and relentless bad news, it's easy to believe everything is already decided—that we're just watching a slow collapse. Despair can start to feel rational, even responsible. But here's the problem: when we decide the future is sealed, we're actually letting ourselves off the hook. If nothing matters, why bother? This talk e...

What happens when the promises of progress turn into frustration? When the institutions we've trusted prove unfaithful? Drawing on MLK's lesser-known "three evils" speech and the ancient prophet Jeremiah, this sermon explores what it means to be faithful when everything you've taken for granted is crumbling. It's about surviving Saturday—that disorienting space between disaster and restoration. Th...

Most of us feel like we missed the day in fourth grade when everyone else learned how to be enough. We know how to deconstruct harmful beliefs, but we've forgotten how to reconstruct something that can hold us. We're experts at spotting manipulation but have lost the ability to be moved. And when the foundations we took for granted—whether theological, political, or personal—start crumbling, it's...

Fear has a way of convincing us that silence and compliance will keep us safe—but what happens when staying quiet means cooperating with harm? This sermon explores how fear gets weaponized to control us, especially in times when oppressive power seems to be winning. Through the story of the Magi, we see what it looks like when an encounter with something true makes compliance intolerable. Shae Was...

What does biblical manhood actually look like? Spoiler: it's not what you've been told. This sermon explores the story of Joseph—a carpenter who had every reason to walk away from Mary's inexplicable pregnancy but chose something more difficult: solidarity, humility, and embracing mystery over control. Pastor Tonetta draws from the metaphor of a Korean spa scrub to explore what we need to shed dur...