The Table Church DC

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 — aren't a consolation prize for people without power. They're actually the model. And that staying at the table, even when you have nothing impressive to offer, might be the most honest form of resistance available.

 

New to The Table or just stumbling across this? You don't need a faith background to find something here. Come as you are.

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 don't need a them to make an us," and what it looks like to walk out of a tomb while the grave clothes are still on.

Whether you're a longtime churchgoer or someone religion has hurt, this one's for you.

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 it really looks like to resist something without becoming it. The answer involves a donkey, 70,000 candles, and the idea that showing up — openly, stubbornly, joyfully — is its own kind of power.

If you're feeling stuck between fight and flight right now, this one's worth your time.

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, the Palestinian practice of holding onto house keys across generations, and his own improbable journey to becoming an all-state wrestler — to make a case that hope isn't passive. It's a practice. Sometimes it's a deed in a jar. Sometimes it's a barbecue.

Whether you're rebuilding your faith, navigating a world that feels like it's unraveling, or just trying to figure out what it even means to act with hope right now — this one's for you.

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 funerals to Jesus walking toward the cross, the throughline is the same: mourning together is what softens us, connects us, and makes space for something new.

If you've been running from something heavy lately — this one's for you.

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 how a marriage metaphor — messy, painful, and sometimes deeply uncomfortable — slowly transforms across scripture. The God who accuses becomes the God who absorbs the cost. And the invitation to return isn't "fix what you broke." It's just: turn around and acknowledge it.

Lent isn't a dramatic moment. It's a daily practice of noticing which direction you're facing — and being willing to shift.

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 prophet Jeremiah and a deeply personal story about 27 years of carrying the wrong narrative, Anthony explores the difference between a heart that shatters under pressure and one that can be remolded — and what it looks like to build real life in the middle of the fragments.

If you're in a season of loss, disillusionment, or rebuilding something that looks nothing like what you planned, this one's for you.

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 Lion King, this message explores what it actually looks like to move from survival mode into something more alive. The insight at the center: you can't build a real future from a frozen heart.

If you've been running from something — or just quietly going through the motions — this one's worth your time. Grab a journal. There's a writing prompt at the end.