Last Wednesday night I was visited by an angel. His name was Michael, and I met him right out there in the lobby. He was sitting on the couch, patiently waiting for me while I was in a meeting. As I came out of my meeting, he approached me and asked if I was the pastor of the church. When I told him I am, he asked if I had a few minutes to talk. We sat down on the couch, and he told me that he was looking for a church that would welcome him. He told me that he’d grown up Catholic. “Me too,” I answered, hoping to quickly form a bond. Then he told me that that didn’t work for him anymore, and that he’d been searching for something else for quite a while. He’d tried an evangelical Christian church, but he couldn’t get on board with their narrow path to salvation or their emotive style of worship.

“What’s it like here?” he asked. I told him about the diversity of beliefs among us, and how we’re all bound by a shared understanding that none of us has all the answers and we’re all seeking together. I told him about our commitment to social justice and described some of our activities in that arena. I described a little bit about what happens here on Sunday mornings.

Then Michael asked me, “Do you think there’s room for someone like me here?” and I asked him what he meant. He said, “I’m politically conservative.” He went on to tell me that, while he’d been waiting for me to come out of my meeting, he’d been looking at our bulletin boards, and that from what he read he was concerned that he wouldn’t be accepted here. “Take climate change, for example,” he said. “There are a lot of scientists that say it’s been happening since the earth began. I don’t believe it’s a man-made problem. Would I be skating uphill here?” That’s the term he used: “skating uphill.” In the space between his question and my response, he put it more pointedly: “In a liberal church that says they accept a diversity of viewpoints, would I be welcomed here or would I be shunned?” That was the word he used: “shunned.”

How would you answer Michael’s question? How would we treat a so-called climate-denier here in our church, if they had the courage to say out loud that they didn’t believe that global warming was a man-made problem? What would we do, for that matter, if someone walked through our doors this morning wearing a red MAGA hat or a “Trump 2020” button on their blouse? These questions, like the one asked by the angel Michael last Wednesday night, force us to confront the question: “Who are we as a people of faith?” Or, to put it in terms of our spiritual theme of “Expectation,” what does our faith expect of us? What does it expect from us?

Last week I proposed that the 20th century building blocks of Unitarian Universalism, which were “freedom, reason and tolerance,” needed updating. I suggested that, while not discarding those values, we place at our bedrock instead the principles of “love, justice, and transformation.” This week I’m turning the tables and asking not “what can we expect from our faith,” but “If our motivating values are love, justice and transformation, what does our faith require of us?” If that question has a familiar ring to it, that’s because it’s been asked for centuries. For millennia, actually. If we look in the Hebrew Bible to the book of Micah, Chapter 6, verse 8, we find the question: “What does the Lord require of you?” and the answer: “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” The more I’ve thought about this, the more I keep coming back to Micah 6:8. “Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly.” Isn’t that really, in a nutshell, what it’s all about? I could just sit down now and be done with today’s message, but I’m guessing you’re hoping I might spend a little bit of time unpacking it.

If we claim that “love, justice and transformation” are the foundational principles of a 21st century Unitarian Universalism, what are we to do? How are we to act? What might need to change within us so that we