Everything We Carry

Open

Anthony started with a split screen: picking up after a new puppy while the news carried a threat to end a civilization. What ordinary thing did you do this week while something enormous was happening in the world?

Discuss

1. Read Luke 24:13–35 aloud. The two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, and Jesus walks their direction instead of turning them around. What do you notice about how he meets them?
2. “Stay with us” is hospitality out of need, Anthony said, “a please-don’t-leave-us-alone-tonight kind.” When has asking for company been harder than offering it?
3. Their eyes open at the breaking of bread, after a whole Bible study on the road didn’t do it. Anthony called the ordinary “the instrument of revelation.” Where have you recognized something holy in an ordinary meal or moment?
4. Anthony warned that find-God-in-the-ordinary preaching can flatten into “therapeutic deism with a casserole,” and insisted that the ordinary is where the transcendent lives. What’s the difference, in practice?
5. “I cannot allow my joy to be hitched to an erratic bully,” Anthony said. The resistance is “I will care for you. I will stay at the table.” Does that feel like enough, given the scale of what’s happening? Push back if it doesn’t.
6. Anthony named three ways we answer disappointment: performing our way back to worthiness, over-functioning so people won’t leave, or checking out so we never get hurt again. Which pull do you recognize, if any?

This week

Anthony’s invitation that Sunday was to stay after church and talk to someone. This week, stay somewhere you’d usually slip out of early, or say “stay with us” to someone: a meal, a walk, a text to a friend who’s struggling.

Close in prayer

Pray for anyone walking away from something this week, sad and tired, and for eyes to recognize Christ at ordinary tables.

Open

Researchers at UC Irvine found that we now look at a screen for about 47 seconds before switching to something else. What most often grabs your next 47 seconds?

Discuss

1. Read Acts 1:6–11. The disciples ask a when question (“Is this the time?”), and Jesus answers with a where: Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth. What is your Jerusalem right now, the place and people where your witness starts?
2. Anthony confessed that the 10 p.m. reinstall of Instagram is his version of asking “Has anything good happened yet?” What are you looking for when you refresh?
3. Acts 1:7 uses two words for time: χρόνος (chronos), clock time, and καιρός (kairos), the charged moment when something shifts. Where have you felt a kairos moment break into an ordinary week?
4. “I say yes to the committee because guilt was louder than wisdom,” Anthony said. Which of your commitments are yours to carry, and which did you take on to avoid feeling guilty?
5. Anthony called devotion “one of the most well-disguised forms of avoidance”: reading the books, sharing the posts, showing up for the march, and ghosting the friend who asked for help moving. Where does that land for you?
6. The angels don’t tell the disciples they’re looking the wrong way. They ask why they’re standing still. What would it take for you to move?

This week

Try one of Anthony’s practices this week. Do a yes audit: go through your calendar and set down one commitment that was never yours. Or name your Jerusalem and give one person your undistracted attention, phone in the other room.

Close in prayer

Pray for the grace to carry only what is yours, to let your yes be yes and your no be no, and to trust God with the times and seasons.

Open

Tonetta opened with Tim O’Brien’s list of what the soldiers carried, from rations to letters from home. What’s one thing you always have with you, in a pocket or a bag?

Discuss

1. O’Brien writes that the soldiers carried their grief and fear inside, “maintaining the masks of composure.” Tonetta said that describes most of us most of the time. Where do you feel the pressure to keep your composure?
2. When Nehemiah hears that Jerusalem’s walls are down, he sits and weeps for days before he makes any plan. “You cannot repair what you will not grieve,” Tonetta said. What has grief made possible for you that a quick pivot couldn’t?
3. Tonetta confessed that she had been too quiet about money, and said “not talking about money is not a neutral act.” What comes up in you when a church talks about money?
4. Malcolm Foley writes, “An anti-racist community is an anti-greed community.” How do you see racial justice and money connected?
5. Nehemiah 3 is a list of names, families building the section of wall nearest their own homes. Tonetta called it “the scandal of the particular.” What is your section of the wall?
6. Tonetta closed with a weight of hope that differs from the weight of burden: it still presses on your chest, but it moves you forward. Which weight are you carrying more of right now?

This week

Read Nehemiah 3 slowly this week, every name. Then name your own section of the wall: one particular commitment to this community that you can keep.

Close in prayer

Pray for the courage to grieve what’s broken and to strengthen your hands for the common good, naming the people and places you’re building with.

Open

Daniel opened with a Florence + the Machine lyric about healing: “Miracles are often inconvenient.” What good thing in your life arrived inconveniently?

Discuss

1. Read Exodus 1:15–2:10. The midwives lie to Pharaoh, a mother hides her son, a sister watches from the reeds, and Pharaoh’s daughter opens the basket. Daniel pointed out that the story of liberation starts “with a group of women together in an act of care and conspiracy.” What do you notice about each of them?
2. Daniel used Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s definition of privilege, “unfair, often unearned advantage,” and said privilege “distorts our view of the world,” leaving us “loudly and confidently wrong.” When has your own view turned out to be distorted?
3. Pharaoh’s daughter’s moment came on an ordinary walk to the river, and she could have looked away. What makes it hard to stop and name what you see?
4. She pays Moses’ mother to nurse him, out of Pharaoh’s money: “funding the revolution,” Daniel said, “on Pharaoh’s dime.” Daniel borrowed a term from Resource Generation, class traitor. What would it look like to betray the systems that gave you an advantage?
5. In Exodus she is only “the daughter of Pharaoh.” Some rabbinic traditions find her again in 1 Chronicles 4:18 as Bithiah, בִּתְיָה (Bityah), “daughter of Yah.” What names or labels do you want to step out from under?
6. Daniel admitted to timing the walk to church to arrive at 10:33 and skip the lobby. “Like Pharaoh’s daughter, I often feel like I’m standing at the river’s edge.” Where are you standing at the edge?

This week

Daniel offered places to start in DC: shop at Black-owned businesses, learn Spanish to know your neighbors, and learn whose land you live on (Native Land’s map is a good first step). Pick one this week.

Close in prayer

Pray for honest eyes, for compassion that moves close, and for the courage to join the conspiracy of liberation instead of cheering from the sidelines.

Open

Who is the most powerful person you’ve known personally? What did their power look like?

Discuss

1. Tonetta began with Antoinette Tuff, the Decatur, Georgia, school bookkeeper who in 2013 talked a gunman into surrendering by listening to him and telling him about her own pain. How does her power compare with the version you were taught?
2. Tonetta read from Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power: never put too much trust in friends, conceal your intentions, get others to do the work but always take the credit. Where have you seen those laws at work, and what did they cost?
3. At Pentecost the disciples speak other people’s languages with their Galilean accents intact. Willie James Jennings says “to speak a language is to speak a people.” What does that suggest about the power the Spirit gives?
4. Peter quotes Joel: God will pour out the Spirit on all flesh. Scot McKnight reads that as God democratizing the people of God and judging unjust rulers. What would redistributing power, and not just talking about it, look like in this church?
5. Tonetta wants to reclaim the word revival, in the key of Azusa Street, a church shaped by Black women domestics, washerwomen and janitors. What word from your religious past would you reclaim, and which would you let go?
6. Tonetta named three commitments: speaking, intimacy and redistribution. She suspects the closet most of us are in is the one that keeps us from telling the stories of our relationship with Jesus. Which commitment is hardest for you?

This week

Pick one of Tonetta’s commitments for the week: ask someone “How is your soul?”, plan a regular lunch with people from church, or give something away.

Close in prayer

Pray that the wind would blow and the fire would fall here, and that we would receive power toward one another, never power over.

Open

Matt asked the room for the weirdest thing anyone had found at the bottom of a bag. What’s yours?

Discuss

1. Matt wondered whether spiritual gifts are something we’ve left at the bottom of the bag. When you hear “spiritual gifts,” what comes up: curiosity, discomfort, indifference, something else?
2. Both 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12 insist that everyone has gifts, with no hierarchy. How does that sit with your experience of church, where gifts were sometimes ranked, misused or skipped?
3. Matt named real wounds: being told you weren’t healed because your faith wasn’t strong enough, or a stranger’s “word from the Lord” that turned out homophobic or sexist. How do we honor that hurt and stay open to the good these gifts might offer?
4. Prophecy is the only gift on both lists. Drawing on Walter Brueggemann, Matt described it as naming what’s wrong and casting a vision of what could be, bridging the gap between injustice and freedom. Where do you long for someone to do that?
5. The Romans gifts (serving, teaching, encouraging, giving) fit easily on a quiz. The Corinthians gifts (healing, miracles, discernment) feel riskier. Why do you think we drift toward the safe ones, and what might we lose by staying there?
6. Matt described praying over people and sharing a word or a picture that sometimes landed. Science Mike might call that attentive listening; Matt couldn’t fully explain it. Do those explanations have to compete?

This week

Notice a gift at work in someone else this week, the way a friend puts people at ease or tells the truth kindly, and tell them what you saw. As Matt put it, “you can do a lot of harm trying to figure out your spiritual gifts on your own.”

Close in prayer

Pray honestly about your mixed relationship with spiritual gifts, the wariness and the old wounds and the quiet hope. Ask the Spirit to help this group notice and nurture the gifts already among you. Leave room for silence.

Open

Think of something you own that you’d have a hard time parting with, not because it’s expensive, but because of what it means to you. What is it?

Discuss

1. Tonetta asked, “What do you own that owns you back?” For her it was her house. What came to mind for you, and why does it have that grip?
2. David refuses Araunah’s free threshing floor: “I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing.” What’s the difference between a gift that costs you and one that doesn’t?
3. Tonetta told about her family’s farmland in North Carolina, the surest shield against Jim Crow, and the porch going quiet whenever a white stranger’s car turned up the drive. How does knowing why we hold on change the conversation about letting go?
4. Arthur McGill warned that churches preach “the gospel of love without the gospel of need,” and called love “self-expenditure.” Does that ring true to you, or does it go too far?
5. In Philippians 2:7 Christ “emptied himself,” ἐκένωσεν (ekenosen), the verb behind the word kenosis. Richard Beck sums it up: Jesus rejects an identity grounded in gaining, Paul an identity rooted in grasping. Where does your sense of security quietly attach itself?
6. William Stringfellow said a church’s tapestries only mean something if the church is free to sell them to pay someone’s rent. What would it look like to be that free with what you have?

This week

Take one small, concrete step to loosen your grip on the thing that owns you back: give something away, share something you’d normally keep for security, or say out loud to someone you trust the fear underneath the holding on.

Close in prayer

Pray about where you locate your security and identity. Make room for honesty about the fears beneath holding on, and ask for the freedom to give at cost, trusting the self-giving God.

Open

Think of a community you’ve belonged to where you had to give something (time, money, energy) to be part of it. What made it worth the cost, or made you want to opt out?

Discuss

1. Anthony started with young men flocking to churches that offer a God of hierarchy and domination, and said that people are starving for something. What do you think they’re hungry for?
2. The Macedonian churches are broke and in the middle of a crisis, and they beg Paul to let them give (2 Corinthians 8:1–4). What’s surprising, or uncomfortable, about a church you have to talk out of giving?
3. “Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager.” Where do you feel the pull between wanting community and protecting your schedule, your boundaries or your independence?
4. Paul uses one word, χάρις (charis), for both grace and gift, and calls the collection κοινωνία (koinonia), shared life. “Giving is not a tax on grace,” Anthony said. “Giving is grace.” How does that change the way you think about giving?
5. Anthony reclaimed prosperity as enough for everyone, measured in beauty and health and the well-being of people not yet born, and said a thing that grows and never stops is a tumor. What is enough, for you?
6. “I’ll be generous when I’m rich” is like “I’ll run a marathon when I’m faster,” Anthony said. We only become whoever we’ve been practicing being. What has shaped your habits of giving and holding on?

This week

Paul says the Macedonians gave themselves first (8:5). Give yourself somewhere this week: show up for someone who’s exhausted, or say yes to an interruption you’d usually schedule around. Then notice whether it drained you or produced the kind of joy Paul calls ἱλαρός (hilaros), the root of “hilarious” (9:7).

Close in prayer

Pray the line from that Sunday’s litany, “Teach us the word enough,” and hold up the people quietly carrying more than their share.

Bekki’s sermon talks frankly about sex and the harm of purity culture, with brief mentions of sexual abuse. Leaders may want to say so at the start.

Open

Think of a time you held onto something tightly out of fear of losing it. Did keeping it safe serve you, or cost you something?

Discuss

1. A talent was 15 to 20 years of a laborer’s wages. The third servant buries his because, he says, the master is “a hard man,” and the master doesn’t argue. Does that master sound like the God you know in Jesus?
2. Bekki read the parable as a description of life under empire more than a prescription for how God behaves. How does that reading change the story for you?
3. Bekki works with people who have lived through long-term trauma, and said fear shuts down our ability to imagine and solve problems. Where have you seen fear, shame or control used to make people “steward” something, and what grew from it?
4. “For every one positive story I hear, I hear 10 stories of damage,” Bekki said of how churches have handled sexuality. Why do you think faith communities have struggled to talk about it honestly?
5. Bekki proposed grounding sexual ethics in love of God, neighbor and self, in freedom, and in abundant life, which sets hard limits on injustice, exploitation, predation and harm. What feels freeing about that, and what feels hard?
6. What would it look like for this church to build something healthier, around consent, commitment and bodies, for the kids growing up here?

This week

Bekki’s personal challenge, for private reflection or a journal: where do you need to reorient, in how you see God, how you see sex and sexuality, or how you see yourself? If you were taught to think of yourself as damaged goods, write down the truer word Bekki offered: “you are not any of those things.”

Close in prayer

Pray for freedom from fear and shame, for room to breathe more fully, and for a church where every body is loved.