Sermon Illustrations on ownership

One day, a father bought his little boy some French fries. The father, doing what any dad would do, reaches over and moves to take one of the fries off of his kid’s plate. The little boy screams, slap...

The ways that social structures and institutions systematically work against the interest of people of color is called institutional racism. Institutional racism and historic racism are not unrelated ...

What’s the difference between an employee and a partner? In one word — ownership. One of my first jobs was as a barista at this place called Coffee People. It was the anti-Starbucks of the late ’90s. ...

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...

Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Se...

In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ...

“A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees belongs to the Lord; it is holy to the Lord,” reads Leviticus 27:30. It may come as something of a surprise bu...

A distraught man furiously rode his horse up to John Wesley, shouting, “Mr. Wesley, Mr. Wesley, something terrible has happened. Your house has burned to the ground!” Weighing the news for a moment, W...

In his classic monologue, comedian George Carlin riffed on the mountain of stuff we compile. His assertion is that a “house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” So when you get right down to ...

The biblical theology of creation is a negation of theories of private” property and “public” property, our theories of individual ownership and collective or governmental ownership. The biblical view...

I love old homes. I’m always drawn to them. The character, the drama, the history. The possibility they possess in a different way than a new build does. Often when referring to older homes, people sa...

A traveler, between flights at an airport, went to a lounge and bought a small package of cookies. Then she sat down and began reading a newspaper. Gradually, she became aware of a rustling noise. Fro...