This is the second time I have been asked to speak for the annual fund drive at this church. The first was almost exactly twenty-five years ago, in 1971. The high school youth group, which was called the LRY in those days, was waiting tables at the canvass dinner. Dave Connolly, the M.C. for the evening, invited three members of the church to speak after we had set dessert and coffee. I think it was Paul Caskey who spoke first, for The Past: the great days of Charles Parker Connolly, the struggles through the Great Depression and the Second World War, the rebuilding of the congregation during the postwar ministries of Jack Mendelsohn and Alan Deale and others. The president at that time &emdash; I'm sorry I don't remember who, perhaps Floyd Palm, Bob Bowen, or Pat Brown &emdash; spoke for The Present, and I spoke for The Future.

I haven't any recollection what I said. (And neither do you!) Someone told me afterward that they "heard every word," and that they appreciated that I spoke more briefly than the other two. With this encouragement I went into the ministry, and ever since, my life has pulsed with the life-giving annual rhythm of the every-member canvass.

The cause for which we gather is not sexy or especially dramatic. Our gifts on this occasion go for heating oil, construction paper, disability insurance, tuning, vacuum cleaners, chair repairs, books, conferences, snow shoveling, choir practices, hospital visits, children's stories, rug replacement, light bulbs, counseling sessions, and sheet music. These are the sustaining gifts. This is the support that keeps the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockford going from year to year, and from generation unto generation.

What does it all add up to? What difference does it make whether we give generously or parsimoniously, whether consistently or according to the vicissitudes of our enchantment or our disenchantment of the moment? How do we measure the effect, not of the specific actions of this board and these committees &emdash; as important as they are &emdash; but the long-term effect of the presence of this institution in this city, decade after decade?

There can be no precise answer to this question. No geometer with straight-edge and compass can construct the measure of the influence of this church on its community. Not even a historian could prove it from the evidence, though there would be plenty. And yet, in this as in every sphere of life, we need to act. If we wait till we are certain, life will pass, leaving us uncommitted and without effect. And so, lacking proof or certainty, we must decide whether we trust this church enough to invest seriously in it.

Knowledge can bring us close to conviction; what moves those of us who give and give generously to Unitarian Universalist churches is knowledge but trust, which is courage to extrapolate from our own experience of goodness and transformation. One step beyond knowledge is faith in the ideals that underlie the Unitarian Universalist idea, hope that the good we have received we can pass on to our successors, and love that inspires us to extend ourselves for others.

Let me share with you some memories.

The day I wore my new, rust-colored sportjacket it to Sunday School for the first time, Norah Bourland, who told stories to the children every Sunday in those days, greeted me this way: "Why, Danny! You look like the president of a bank!" (I am not called Danny very often any more, but last weekend I addressed a conference in Massachusetts, and the first question began, "Well now, Danny..." It was, of course, Alan Deale, my childhood minister!) Norah's encouragement, and much else that happened downstairs here and in the Auburn Street church, meant a great deal to me. I have followed in Norah's footsteps; when I'm home in Falmouth I sing songs and tell stories to the children every Sunday at the UU Fellowship where I'm a member. I try to be especially careful how I greet the children, knowing there's a risk they will remember 35 years later.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade I went out on Halloween for trick-or-treating. I had my costume and my paper bag like every other kid, but unlike most kids then I also had an orange box for UNICEF. I don't know what happens today in the Rockford schools; in those days you only carried UNICEF if you were a Unitarian. Eleanor Hurdle, director of religious education then, explained each year that a nickel bought a vaccination and a quarter bought milk for twelve children for a week, and so on. She also warned us about something that might happen, and did happen, once, to me.

"Trick or treat!" I was with a little group in Loves Park. A man opened the door. After we got our candy, I rattled my box and asked him to put some money in for UNICEF. His face, which had seemed kind, twisted into an angry scowl. "I am not going to give one cent to UNICEF, and I am going to tell you why. Do you know what I am? I am a John Bircher. And the UN is nothing but a bunch of Communists!"

As I backed off from the doorway, I remembered Mrs. Hurdle's explanation: "UNICEF helps children all over the world, wherever it can. Some people think children who live in Communist countries shouldn't get help because the children are Communists! But we believe that every child should have medicine and an education, no matter what the grownups who run the country call themselves."

It was an early lesson in what it's like to stand alone &emdash; and not to stand alone.

I remember the term, in perhaps fifth or sixth grade, when Norm Ericson taught Sunday School. The curriculum must have had to do with nature; because Norm, as many of you know, is a master teacher of biology. But what impressed me most was the frank way Norm expressed to us his own unease with Unitarian Universalism. With great respect for this church, its ministers and members, Norm let us know that he was not a true believer but a member of the loyal opposition, carrier of considered reservations. This made a special impression on me because I knew that one of Norm's Sunday School teachers had been Del Hotchkiss, my father. And I had heard my father many times express with equal loyalty and fervor his own reservations about Unitarianism, his own criticisms of this church, its ministers and members. It did not strike me until recently that all this was happening in the tenor section of the choir!

And speaking of the choir section, I remember, among many other memorable characters this church has given me the privilege to know, Mr. Harry Treadwell. If you don't remember Harry, and you go back more than twenty years in this church, I need only say, "Behold That Star," and you'll remember. 'Most every Christmas Harry sang the baritone solo and it was a high point. Harry was a black man with hardened hands and a voice of raw silk. He came to me for several weeks one summer for guitar lessons. I was not much of a guitarist, but Harry chose me for some reason; he worked hard and I hope he got what he was looking for. I surely did.

One Sunday as an intern in the UU church in Concord, Mass., I hosted a guest preacher, the Reverend Dorothy Spoerl, whose name I recognized as one of the eminent religious educators when I was a child. Dottie had spent years as a field worker for the UUA among the "Fellowships," small groups started by the hundreds in the 50's and the 60's. When she learned I had come out of the Rockford church she said, "Rockford &emdash; I have never been to Rockford, but I'm interested in that church. When I was traveling from Fellowship to Fellowship in California, I found that in at least half of them, at least one member of the founding group was from the Rockford church." That is a testimony that I wasn't looking for and did not expect &emdash; but it tells you that there's something here that people wanted to recreate elsewhere.

Many of you know, I think, that Unitarian Universalism is for me somewhat hereditary. When my father died last year, Dave Weissbard said his top priority in life, other than his family, was this church. And it was true. For Del Hotchkiss, membership in this church was a deep commitment. His contribution to the building of this building was a source of lasting pride. And Unitarian Universalism &emdash; Unitarianism, he would probably have said &emdash; was for him a potent bundle of convictions about knowledge, duty, liberty, human potential, and human responsibility.

Del was on a business trip the spring of 1965. In Omaha he found there was a presidential campaign meeting in the same hotel. It was a rally for a candidate Del didn't know much about, so he picked up some literature and found it filled with racial hatred and resentment. The candidate was the then governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace. This was uncomfortable. What made it unbearable to share a hotel in silence with the Wallace people was the evening paper, where Del read the news that a young Unitarian minister in Selma for a civil rights demonstration, James Reeb, was murdered on his way out of a restaurant by white thugs.

Del was in no mood to pick a fight, but he wanted a small gesture, as he told me later, "that would make it clear where I stood." So he called up the Unitarian Church and arranged to buy a Flaming Chalice pin. And for the rest of his stay in Omaha he wore that symbol of Unitarian Universalism on his lapel.

It was a quiet gesture, surely unintelligible to the Wallace people, but the same could be said of James Reeb's gesture when he traveled South for the last time &emdash; that, too, was unintelligible to the men who killed him. In his own small way, Del was determined, even in the middle of a sales trip, to stand with Reeb rather than against him. For him, this church was the bearer of the deepest values that he knew.

No one has disagreed more often with the minister, or scoffed more heartily at UU foolishness, or dissented from church policies more often than Del Hotchkiss. At the same time, no one has been more consistent in support, more loyal in his opposition, or more willing to take on jobs glamorous and onerous and even hazardous, than he. I believe it was George Santayana who said, Every institution needs some persons who will give it more commitment than it deserves. And that is true. If we wait for a perfect institution, we will spend our lives in waiting. If instead we make a large investment in a less-than-perfect institution whose ideals and purposes we share, our gifts will return to us "an hundredfold."

More than once, and in all kinds of ways, this church has been here for my family and for yours. My sister Linda was fifteen, I was eleven, and Sara was nine months when our brother Ralf was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident, thirty years ago this summer. Our parents were preoccupied, to say the least, and Andra was working two working, and I was away at summer camp, so for a while Linda was in charge. It was a big responsibility for a fifteen-year-old, and Linda will never forget the casseroles and groceries that showed up daily, the people who stopped by to hold the baby. I will not forget that someone quietly told Del during the coffee hour that for the time being he would not be getting a gas station credit card bill. The support our family received in those years was unmeasured and immeasurable.

In a crisis, we need personal support, practical assistance &emdash; and, perhaps most of all, we need sustaining trust or faith. This is at bottom what we hope for from a church. In our culture we often hear it said that losses, injuries and death are unendurable without Jesus. What happens when a family of Unitarian Universalists finds itself ensnared in such a crisis? Despair? Nihilism? Foxhole conversions? What? Where do we find strength?

Each of us can answer for himself or herself. I will say I was not raised in this church "without Jesus." The Jesus I encountered here was not a condescending God, but something far more useful: Jesus was a man who lived on principle, who encountered his mortality with poise, and had a transforming influence on others despite an unjust, squalid death. Ralf's accident taught me that I, too, am subject to the law of loss; that I, too, get one chance to live this life; that I, too, am subject to the limits and the possibilities that flesh is heir to.

No religious institution or perspective is completely adequate, but the values and encouragement my family has received through this church and Unitarian Universalism for now four generations have served us well.

And we are not the only ones. One of my best friends in elementary school was the son of an alcoholic minister. He and I walked up and down the playground arguing about politics, science, sometimes even religion. He and his mother suffered much, but finally enough was enough and the parents were divorced. I learned recently that my friend's mother is now a Unitarian Universalist. So far as I knew she had not attended this church, but somehow she knew, when she was on her own in another city, she would find a welcome in the UU church there.

One of my best friends in junior high belonged, like me, to a gang of budding pseudo-intellectuals. We saw 2001 together &emdash; we weren't sure what it was about, but afterward we felt wise and sophisticated. Recently I gave a sermon in the UU Church in San Diego, and I found my friend's family had become prominent in that church &emdash; they were naming a new kitchen after his mother, who was dying. So far as I know they never attended this church, but somehow they knew, when the right time came in their lives, that they would find a welcome in a UU church.

One of my best friends in high school &emdash; my first date, in fact &emdash; was a awkward girl who worried a lot about her weight and never seemed to know whether to chase boys or bury herself in schoolwork or be angry at the world. Recently she saw my name in the World magazine and called me up. She now is, by her own description, an ecstatically happy overweight lesbian computer nerd and member of a UU Fellowship in a far city. So far as I know she never attended this church, but somehow she knew, when she had found herself, where she would find a congregation to call home.

And so on and on. These are just people I happen to know &emdash; and each of you could multiply the stories. This institution casts a long and warming shadow, touching people known and unknown, working its transforming influence on persons, families and communities.

And that is why I ask you to consider a substantial change of thinking about your giving to this church. I am asking you, if your pledge resembles the cost of a bag of groceries, to consider pledging something on the order of a mortgage payment. If your pledge is close to what you pay for cable service, think about a year's tuition at a private school. Compare the value of this church Æ97Ä to you and to others in the long, long run &emdash; to the value of the other things you use your money for, and pledge accordingly.

We all fall into different categories, but we all are capable of giving generously. Jesus wasn't kidding about widows' mites &emdash; small contributions from poor people are essential. One hundred percent participation is important for the democratic spirit of our church. It's actually harder for the wealthy to be generous: several of us here would have to squeeze a ten- or twenty-thousand-dollar camel through the needle every year to achieve equal generosity. Most of us like to think we're in the middle, and some really are. We, too, need to change our thinking &emdash; I'm not talking about increasing 10 or 20 percent; I mean a whole new number, probably a number with more digits in it. For individual advice, I am available and so is your canvasser.

I've shared a bit about the value of this church for me and for my family and for some of my friends whose lives have been changed, years later, by the emanations of its influence. This is a great church; a truly exceptional church. I'm asking you to value it, in terms of your own pledge, at its true value. Without you, this church is nothing. Without your gifts and your participation, it would cease to be. But with a fresh commitment from us all, its greatest influence is yet to come.