What Do You Own That Owns You Back?
On money, identity, and the terrifying freedom of letting go
There's a man I keep thinking about. His name was Anthony — not someone from our congregation, but a young Egyptian man who lived in the third century, the son of well-to-do Coptic Christian parents who had traced their lineage all the way back to the builders of the ancient pyramids. When his parents died young, they left him land, resources, and a clear path forward: live off the inheritance, maintain what has been built, secure what can be kept.
And then one morning he walked into a church and heard these words from the gospel, spoken as if the room had gone quiet around him:
"Go. Sell what you have. Give to the poor, and follow me."
He walked out and did exactly that. He disposed of everything, gave the proceeds away, and began a life of radical poverty and prayer. A life so compelling that communities eventually gathered around him. He became known to history as Anthony the Great — the father of Christian monasticism, a formative influence on St. Augustine, and eventually one of the most sought-after people in the world. Someone who owned absolutely nothing and yet possessed something that could not be exhausted.
I want to be clear: I'm not going to tell you that you have to do what Anthony did. I felt the anxiety in the room the moment I read those words — that is not my ministry — and I hear that. But scripture has enormous, irreducible things to say about money and possessions. And any serious conversation about stewardship has to go to the uncomfortable places, not just the manageable ones.
So let's go there together.
The Weight We Carry
We are living through something that I think needs to be named plainly. Over the last forty years — through waves of privatization, deregulation, and deeply unequal global arrangements — many of us have felt, in the most personal ways, the creep of something sinister: rabid wealth disparity, the fracturing of community, and an ever-more-overwhelming commodification of every part of our lives. It is no wonder the question of what to do with what we have can feel so crushing. The calls of scripture to generosity are clear and piercing. And yet in a system where government safety nets keep getting thinner, we instinctively know we cannot simply rely on them to catch us.
I know this heaviness from my own family's history.
On my father's side, I come from several generations of Black farmers in North Carolina who slowly accumulated land and then fought — really fought — to keep it in the family. As a kid, my parents would take us to visit my grandparents' farm. I can still remember sitting on that big porch with all our extended family, watching a car turn up the long drive in the distance. If we saw white folks in the car, everything went quiet. The men would leave the porch and go see what they wanted. Even then, as a child, I understood it as a protective gesture.
Our land was everything. For generations, it had been the surest thing — the thing that shielded my family from the whims of the Jim Crow South. To release that land in any way, even today, is unthinkable for much of my family. Because they know what it means to have the ground taken from underneath you.
And still — the scriptures are wonderfully, stubbornly challenging. The need of our world is shamefully great. And the dream that God hands to disciples is so incredibly big: feed the poor, clothe the naked, shelter the unhoused, free the prisoner of every sort. And while you're at it, free the prison guard too.
An Offering That Costs Something
When I was preparing to preach on these themes, one verse stopped me cold. It comes near the end of 2 Samuel (24:24), where David is in trouble — which is, frankly, a recurring situation if you read his story carefully. He has ordered a military census, numbering the people, and God counts it as sin. Perhaps the census itself is a kind of grasping — an impulse to quantify what he thinks is his, to treat God's holy nation as an inventory to be deployed.
Judgment falls, and David is given a chance to intercede for his people. He goes to a man named Araunah the Jebusite to purchase his threshing floor as a site for offering. Araunah, with extravagant generosity, offers it to David for free — the floor, the oxen, all of it. Take it.
David refuses. And what he says next is one of the most compressed and clarifying lines in all of his story:
"I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing."
There is something here that cuts straight to the heart of giving. An offering that requires nothing of the giver is not an offering. It is a transaction with nothing at stake — a surface-level gesture dressed up as devotion. To give in a way that costs you is to be changed by the giving. The sacrifice and the self cannot both walk away intact.
And that threshing floor — the one David purchases at full price — later becomes the site of Solomon's temple, a place that structures the worship of an entire people for hundreds of years.
That's a beautiful story. But if I'm honest, in the world we actually live in, it isn't quite enough on its own. Because to talk about costly giving is to brush up against something deeper: the anxiety of self-preservation, the dread of diminishment, the fear of our own disappearance.
The Neighborhood Your Soul Inhabits
The theologian Arthur McGill writes about this with unsettling clarity. He says: "Too often in churches we hear the gospel of love without the gospel of need. Too often we hear the lie that love is to help others without this help having any effect upon ourselves... Love is self-expenditure. A real expending, a real losing, a real deterioration of the self. It's not pessimism. It's the honesty of what love costs."
To give truly — to give in a way that moves you into neediness — is to brush up against the thing we are most afraid of. Underneath the compulsive drive toward possession is this desire to matter, to persist, to refuse to disappear.
This is exactly what Jesus is diagnosing in Matthew 6:19–21 when he says: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
He's not running a financial seminar. He is identifying the location of our identity. He is saying: wherever you place your security, your hope, your fundamental sense of who you are — that is where you live. That's the neighborhood your soul inhabits.
McGill calls this an identity of possession: I am who I am because of what I own, what I control — my income, my property, my reputation, my carefully constructed self. We build ourselves on things that can be taken from us, and then we live in terror of losing them.
And this is why Jesus, barely pausing, pivots immediately to anxiety. In Matthew 6:25–33, he turns to the birds of the air who neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns. He turns to the lilies of the field. He says: "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you."
The disciples' worry — along with our own — isn't a character flaw. It is the predictable outcome of building a self on things that can be taken away.
What Do You Own That Owns You Back?
The lawyer and theologian William Stringfellow tells a story I can't stop thinking about. He was once called by a pastor who was concerned about a woman in his congregation who couldn't pay her rent. Stringfellow, rushing to catch a flight, said impatiently: "Sell one of your tapestries and pay the rent." Then he hung up and ran to the airport.
On the plane, he wondered if he'd been too harsh. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized his advice was sound. In his book, he writes: "Exactly what the church must be free to do is to sell the tapestries to pay the rent. To pay somebody else's rent. To pay anybody's rent who can't pay their own. If they have that freedom, then — but only then — does the tapestry have religious significance."
The point wasn't whether the church sold the tapestries. The heart of the matter was whether they were willing to.
I want to be honest with you here. For me, the thing that owns me back is my house. My wife and I have struggled with housing since 2020 — three moves in four years, most of them out of our control, a lot of money lost, a lot of sleep lost. And now it's very easy for that sense of settledness my house gives me to become an idol. The thing that owns me back. Some days I feel hopeless to fight that.
But then I remember there is an alternative.
The God Who Empties Himself
"Jesus rejects an identity grounded in gaining, and Paul rejects an identity rooted in grasping. Salvation is found in losing — to use Jesus' term — and emptying — to use Paul's — both pointing to the death that leads to life." — Richard Beck
In Philippians 2:5–8, Paul calls the church at Philippi to a kenotic — self-emptying — way of being. Jesus, who existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped. He emptied himself, took the form of a servant, humbled himself to the point of death.
This is the kenotic identity — the identity of self-giving. And Jesus echoes it in Matthew 16:25: "Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
I want to be careful here. The denial of self that Jesus calls us to is not about the erasure of personality, not about self-hatred, not about becoming less than who you fully are. He's asking the disciples — asking us — to deny a particular way of building the self. One that is not rooted in possession, in anxious accumulation, in the things that can always be taken away.
Victor Hugo understood this. In Les Misérables, the bishop known to his people as Bienvenu — "welcome" — opens his door to Jean Valjean, a man the world has decisively discarded. He feeds him, sits with him, gives him a clean bed. In the early morning, Valjean steals the bishop's silverware and runs. He is caught and dragged back. The police expect the bishop to confirm the theft.
Instead, the bishop tells them it was a gift. And then, turning to Valjean with gentle reproach, he tells him he forgot the candlesticks, too.
What's easy to lose in that story is that those candlesticks had been in the bishop's family for decades. His act was not painless. But Bienvenu had built his identity somewhere other than on what he owned. He was free — free to give at cost, free to love extravagantly, free to be, in that cold pre-dawn moment, a living imitation of Christ. Not grasping, not gaining, but emptying himself for someone the world said did not deserve it.
And Valjean carried the candlesticks for the rest of his life. They were the mark of what grace had done for him — and what it had cost someone else.
A Different Arithmetic
Here is the good news I want us to take to the bank: we are not talking about grim, depleting sacrifice. We are talking about an economy of grace — a different arithmetic altogether, one where the logic of the kingdom of God inverts the logic of the market.
Jesus tells those who have left behind their families and possessions that they will receive more than they ever gave up (Mark 10:29–30). The writer of Hebrews tells us that Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before him (Hebrews 12:2). That's always the test. The joy set before you. There is joy on the other side of giving — not because loss isn't real, but because the self that does the losing is not the self that was built on keeping.
Anthony the Great walked into a church one morning and heard words that shattered the future he had planned. David opened his hand and paid for ground he could have taken for free. A bishop pressed candlesticks into a thief's hands before the sun came up. None of them ended up poorer in the ways that finally mattered.
Letting go of a life built on gaining and grasping rarely happens in a single dramatic moment. It is a thousand small daily decisions about what we hold and what we release. The same love that enabled Jesus to empty himself and become human is the same love that invites us to share a meal with a stranger the world despises, to give away a coat, or even — surprisingly — to commit to a monthly gift to a community trying to broadcast a more beautiful gospel.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
