A sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 8
June 29, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, Arkansas
Readings: Galatians 5:1,13-25; Luke 9:51-62
Free is not your right to choose
It’s answering what’s asked of you
To give the love you find until it’s gone
I don’t listen to secular music much. I am a church nerd through and through. My Spotify playlists are populated with the hymns of the Church, at least generally. The lines of the old hymns make me catch my breath, as the beauty and greatness of God are captured, or at least glimpsed, in a few words. But there are exceptions. There are a few non-hymns on my playlists with lines that make me breathless. Many of them come from the band the Avett Brothers, an American folk rock group. I quoted a few of those lines a moment ago, lines about freedom from their song “Ill with Want.” It’s a song about how greed consumes and leaves us sick and empty-handed. The only remedy, they sing, is the freedom found in giving love away, and ultimately giving ourselves away. For in the end that is what is asked of us by Jesus himself: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Or, from today’s gospel: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Free is not your right to choose
It’s answering what’s asked of you
To give the love you find until it’s gone
It’s a good summary of what St. Paul is saying in today’s reading from his letter to the Galatians. The church in Galatia is a conflicted church. There is in-fighting, made all the worse by so-called super apostles who have come in after Paul preaching something different. They are preaching that the Gentile converts have to do more and more to be accepted into the Body of Christ. Paul is livid. These folks have been baptized. They have been buried with Christ. They belong to Christ. Full stop. The grace of God has reached down into their souls, brought them into the life of the Holy Spirit, set them on a new path, commissioned them for a purpose. But the folks in Galatia have given into this other teaching, that the grace of God given them wasn’t enough. They are going along with that message, and Paul is calling them back.
St. Paul writes, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” He’s exhorting them to stay firmly in the grace, the love, the identity they have received by grace through faith at the waters of baptism. He’s encouraging them to live in that identity boldly. For Christ has set them free from the demands of works, free from the need to prove themselves worthy, free from the call to somehow be deserving. You are free, Paul says, for the gift of grace has already come. There is nothing to prove in order to deserve the grace of God. It’s done been poured out. Stand firm and live in it.
This freedom has been poured out into us, too. And yet I hear it all the time–the message of those super apostles from Galatia. They are still around, spreading their message. Sometimes they are voices from the outside, from a culture that puts demands on us and twists God into someone else, a kind of demanding overlord who can never be pleased and who is a moment away from pouring out wrath. Sometimes (and I think these are the most dangerous) they are those inner voices, those tapes that play non-stop in our heads trying to trap us in a loop of despair, holding us captive to the stories we once told ourselves. They say you are not worthy of the grace of God because it’s only reserved for the best. They say that you are not forgiven because you’ve done too much. They say the love of God cannot reach you because you’ve gone too far. They are lies. I don’t care where you’ve been, the grace of God is for you. I don’t care what you’ve done, the forgiveness of God is for you. I don’t care who you are, Christ died for you and the love of God is for you. The freedom of salvation has been poured into your hearts; you are forgiven; you are a child of God, claimed forever by Jesus. Stand firm!
But that’s not the end of the story. So says St. Paul today. The call is to live into that freedom—or, in his words, we have been set free for freedom. So what is this freedom in Christ? Well, it’s not a freedom to do what you want. That’s not freedom at all. Rather, for Paul, freedom is being able to answer the call of God wholeheartedly as a response to the grace poured into our hearts. Freedom is following where Jesus leads, knowing that he is taking us to life, even when we must go through Calvary. Freedom is laying down those things that separate us from God and others, and picking up the fruit of the Spirit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Ultimately, true freedom is found in becoming like Christ and living his life. It’s walking the way of the cross, which is the way of life and peace. True freedom is service, or as Paul says, through love becoming slaves to one another, loving our neighbor as ourselves. We experience true freedom when we respond to God’s grace by picking up the yoke of Christ, and living Christ-like in the world–finding our true lives in love of God and love of neighbor, putting our hand to the plow of love and not looking back.
Free is not your right to choose
It’s answering what’s asked of you
To give the love you find until it’s gone
This week we are celebrating freedom. Too often that freedom turns into self-indulgence, a self-serving thing that says get mine and forget others. The church in Galatia knew all about that. But that’s not true freedom. True freedom is found in loving God, loving neighbor, and loving yourself. It’s found in service to the least, in working for the common good, in love for all, even our enemies. It can be a difficult road, much more difficult than the freedom of just doing what I want no matter how it impacts other people. But it’s the way of Jesus–and the way of life and peace.
So let me ask you: Are you willing to put your hand to that plow and not look back? For this is what has been asked of us–to give the love of Jesus until he comes again.
Storied Grace 