I Am What I Have

“I am what I have.”  You think this one doesn’t apply to you.  Materialism seems like a juvenile sin.  Of course, shiny things can bring you pleasure.  In a consumerist society we are tempted to get more and have more.  More money, more stuff, more travel, more retirement, more trendy clothes and expensive dinners.   
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“I am what I have” seems too obvious a temptation.  Materialism is easy to identify and even easier to deny.  But I think there’s something deeper going on.  I continue my series on identity.  

The Temptation:  I Am What I Have

​Why do we want to have more?  Under bald materialism is a desire for choice.  Control.  Power.  I don’t really love money.  I love what money can do for me, the choice and control it gives me.  

In many respects, “I am what I have” means “I am what I choose.”  With more money, the self is free to feed itself.  With more resources, I break free of limits and constrictions.  “Be who you want.  Do what you want.  Choose what you want.”  Money is the means.  Expressive individualism is the end.  

​George MacDonald once wrote, ​

The first principle of hell is that my life is my own.” ​

In Eden, it wasn’t the fruit that was the sin.  It was the choice, the act of rebellion in a coup against the Creator’s will.  While the modern world waves the banner of the free self, the Bible actually sees such freedom as a prison.  As in Eden, our choice begins as freedom, but ends as bondage.  

If I am what I have, what happens when what I have is my downfall?  When my choice hurts me, traps me, kills me?  What happens when everything I have is turned to nothing?  Then who am I?

The Practice:  Receptivity

The Christian life is a pattern.  Receive and respond.  The first move is always a posture of receptivity.  At the end of his life Martin Luther said, “We are all beggars.”  In the end, one sees that all the money and possessions are meaningless.  The man in hospice care is left with no choice.  Everything is decided for him.

If the first principle of hell is that “my life is my own,” then heaven’s principle is that I am not my own.  I belong to another.  There are practices in the Christian life that put us in this posture, under the mercy and care of God.  In these practices, we confront the expressive self that wants choice and control.  And God melts and molds the rebel self into a new, receptive vessel.  

Christian worship is a form of receptivity.  In worship, we conform ourselves to the pattern of receive and respond.  Our historic liturgies rehearse this for us.  Worship does not begin with “I,” but by invoking the Trinitarian name of God.  Then we confess our sins, emptying ourselves of all sin and pollution.  Then comes the reception of forgiveness, a holy word, and a holy meal.  Only after receiving do we offer back prayer and praise.  The movement here is not “I am what I have,” but “I am what I’m given.”  

Martin Luther taught other practices of receptivity.  Prayer and meditation set aside personal choice and open the self up to receive what God gives.  I could expound on this much further.  Just look up Luther’s “Marks of a Theologian.”  (Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio)

In 2022 I went into a three month sabbatical like a frayed thread about to break.  Some of it was burdens placed on me, but much of it was my own making.  I went in thinking that my choices were what made me.  That my work was what mattered.  I was in charge, and I was finding out how poor I was at it.  

I was healed in the desert, at an Augustinan monastery on the edge of Albuquerque, NM.  I came with nothing but a single suitcase.  No one knew who I was, so I had no reputation.  I gave up all choice and submitted myself to the rhythm of the monastic community.  Daily prayer in the chapel, times of silence and solitude, walks in the desert.  At first I hated it.  Something inside me wanted control, to decide to do what I wanted.  

Soon I began to see signs of receptivity all around me.  There was a statue of John the Baptist with his hands held forth, empty and open.  John the Baptist said,

A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven.” (John 3:27).

The Scriptures give us a spreadsheet of people receptive to what God gives.  Can you imagine Mary responding to Gabriel’s pronouncement of her pregnancy, “No!  I demand a choice in the matter!”  Instead she said, “I am a servant of the Lord.  Let it be to me as you said.”  Can you imagine Abraham responding to God’s call to leave his country, “Actually, this doesn’t jive with my journey of self-discovery.”  

Here's George MacDonald again, speaking of the self.

The self is given to us that, as Christ, we may have something to offer.  Not ‘What should I like to do?’ but ‘What would the Living One have me do?’” ​

God has given me myself, not in order to get something, but to offer something.  

My identity is not in what I have or my power to choose.  It is found in what I’ve been given.  My posture is not one of taking, but receiving.  Not of selfish choosing, but selfless giving.  

If you are tempted to construct an identity based on what you have, then receptivity is an antidote.  Our identity does not come from having, but from receiving.