Love Boldly
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC September 7, 2025, the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Vision!” series.
1 John 4:16b-21; Luke 10:25–37
Earlier this year, about a year after the historic 2024 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, bishops and other key leaders unveiled a new vision statement for our denomination:
“The United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously in local communities and worldwide connections.”
Over the next three weeks, we’ll spend time reflecting on this vision that now guides congregations across the globe. Foundry will launch our own strategic vision at the end of October—and I’m grateful that our vision and the church’s larger vision are beautifully aligned.
Today we focus on “loving boldly.”
Our scriptures for today may sound familiar because they sit at the very center of the Gospel. Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan dramatizes love in action. First John reminds us that anyone who claims to love God but hates a sibling is a liar. Together they proclaim: love of God is never abstract or private—it must be embodied in concrete acts of mercy and love toward others.
In Jesus’ day, Samaritans were despised—seen as religiously deviant and ethnically impure. In Jewish storytelling tradition, if a priest and a Levite appear, listeners would expected the “third character” to be an ordinary Israelite layperson. Instead, Jesus shocks them with a Samaritan. As biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine reminds us, the parable deliberately unsettles, forcing us to imagine mercy from the very person considered an enemy.
Neighborliness, Jesus shows us, is not about identity but action. It is not who you are but what you do. Love boldly crosses lines of ethnicity, religion, even enmity, and refuses to let fear or prejudice have the last word.
This past week, the United Methodist Church lost one of our clearest icons of bold love. Helen Ryde, a Home Missioner and longtime organizer with Reconciling Ministries Network, poured out their life for LGBTQ+ inclusion, racial justice, and intersectional solidarity. Helen served with humility, humor, persistence, joy, and amazing grace.
Rev. Beth LaRocca-Pitts of Atlanta shared a story from Bishop Robin Dease’s installation at Oak Grove UMC. Protesters from the Global Methodist Church had threatened disruption. Sure enough, a man stood up during communion shouting demands. Security ushered him outside. And what did Helen do? They got up, followed him out, and listened. Helen didn’t shame him. Helen didn’t pass him by. They wanted to understand him. That was Helen—embodying love that refuses to write anyone off.
At General Conference last year, a petition I’d worked on came to the floor for a vote. It was a petition to assure that people and churches who left the UMC due to disagreement with the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people would have a “gracious re-entry” path available. Helen spoke in favor of the petition, saying:
“My name is Helen Ryde. I’m a lay delegate from the Western North Carolina Conference. I'm a home missioner. I'm an adult, white, non-binary person, and my pronouns are they/them.
I rise to speak in favor of this petition because I am not the person I am now that I was 30, 35 years ago…my heart has been changed about who I am and how I exist in the world. But if you had told me that many years ago that my heart was going to change, I would have said, ‘No. (laughs) Nope, it ain’t gonna change ‘cause I’m quite sure what the Bible tells me about who I am.’
But I listened to God, and I listened to people who told me that the image of God was in me just as much as it is in people who are heterosexual and cisgender. And so I believe we need to leave the door open.…Many of those who have left have believed gross mischaracterizations about people like me, and I believe many of them are realizing that maybe they shouldn’t have believed them. And so in my heart, I hope and pray that we can have the grace to allow a way back. There are no closed doors in the Kingdom of God. There is nothing that should prevent people from being in a relationship with us as United Methodist Church.”
Helen also said:
“This move to bring our church to a new place has never, ever been about asking anybody to leave. It’s about love. It’s about relationship. And if we can’t see the image of God in every person—every single person—we’ve missed the point.”
Helen’s witness is exactly what our new denominational vision looks like when lived in the flesh. A disciple of Jesus, shaped by the Gospel. And Helen didn’t let fear get in the way of embodied grace and love. //
First John insists that “perfect love casts out fear.” Fear is what likely governed the priest and Levite in Jesus’ parable—fear of ritual impurity, fear of danger, fear of cost. The Samaritan, by contrast, refuses to let fear dictate the response. Mercy requires risk.
John Wesley knew this, too. In 1739 he went to Bristol at George Whitefield’s urging. Seeing crowds of coal miners and workers gathered outside church walls, Wesley felt both horror and divine compulsion. Just two days later, he wrote in his journal, “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile.”
By “more vile,” Wesley meant stepping outside the safety of pulpits and decorum to preach in the open air. It was scandalous, but it ignited a movement. For Wesley, God’s love belonged to miners and prisoners as much as to the elite. That conviction changed Methodism—and the world.
Years earlier, as a young priest at Oxford, Wesley had joined companions in visiting prisoners at Bocardo. Among them was Thomas Blair, sentenced to death for an alleged homosexual relationship. Wesley didn’t just visit—he defended Blair, helped with his legal case, and even paid his fine. The cost was public and risky. It was also love in action.
From the streets of Bristol to the prison cells of Oxford, Wesley embodied the truth our texts proclaim: love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor. Vertical devotion to God is validated by horizontal mercy. This truth lives in the DNA of who we are as Wesleyan, United Methodist, followers of Jesus. //
Scholars point out that the Good Samaritan parable doesn’t provide a neat moral. It resists closure. It breaks down every attempt to fence in the category of “neighbor.” Amy-Jill Levine reminds us that this parable is meant to sting. It keeps asking: Who are you excluding now? Who would you never imagine as your moral exemplar?
That’s what makes the story both inspiring and uncomfortable. Because loving boldly means continually asking that question in every new circumstance. It means opening ourselves to love the ones we’d rather avoid.
We belong to a church—and to a congregation—that is committed to this bold, boundary-breaking love. A love that is active. A love that risks. A love that casts out fear. A love that listens and includes, that embodies the Gospel in the face of prejudice and risk.
To love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength is to love our neighbor without discrimination, without excuse. It is the work of a lifetime, and by God’s grace, we get to do it together.
May we be and become disciples who love boldly. Amen.
