Freedom That Looks Like a Towel and Basin

In Galatians 5:13, Paul writes that we were "called to freedom" — but then, in a move that should stop us in our tracks, he says to use that freedom to "become slaves to one another through love." The Greek word is douleuete — serve as a slave. Paul takes the most radical gift imaginable and bends it downward.

Rachel Held Evans once wrote about finding church again among people who had every reason to leave it. What drew her back was not better theology or louder worship. It was a community that showed up — at eviction hearings, at hospital bedsides, at border towns with water jugs and granola bars. Freedom, she discovered, was not the absence of obligation. It was the presence of love that refuses to look away.

A progressive reading of Galatians 5:13 insists that this mutual service is never abstract. It has an address. It shows up at the food pantry where undocumented families line up on Thursday mornings. It sits in city council chambers advocating for affordable housing. It holds space for the queer teenager who was told God could not possibly love them as they are.

This is the paradox of the Gospel: freedom is real, and it is costly, and it always moves toward the margins. We are liberated not for our own comfort but for the flourishing of our neighbor — especially the neighbor the world has forgotten.