The Book of Exodus states that when Israel came out of Egypt, she was a mixed multitude, and certainly that could apply to us here today. We are about as mixed as you can get. We have represented here the Roman Catholics and the Protestants and the Jews.

Among the Protestants, there are members of seven different denominations or communions. We belong to several different races; we are both male and female. We are a mixed multitude indeed, and the question is therefore if we really have anything in common to give thanks about. What are we doing here, all coming together for a thanksgiving service? Can we really be thankful together, or are we only kidding ourselves? Do we, in fact, have a mutual reason for giving thanks?

Obviously we are all Americans, and of course that is the immediate reason we are here today. The President has issued the annual Thanksgiving Proclamation, the post office and banks and most businesses are closed, and we have the chance of participating in a national holiday. We share a common national heritage, going back to the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts, or maybe as good Virginians we should say it goes back to Berkeley Plantation.

At any rate, we are here first of all because it is a national habit, because a very, very secular government has through the years managed to take on an aura of piety long enough to admonish us that this is a day to give thanks.

But if that is the only reason we are here together, then we had better rethink the whole practice, because if you are going to say thank you, you have to say it to somebody. There is a story about the nineteenth-century English writer, Harriet Martineau, who was something of an atheist. Reveling one day in the glories of an autumn morning, she burst out, "Oh, I'm so grateful!" -- to which her believing companion replied, "Grateful to whom, my dear?"

If we are going to say "thank you," then the presupposition is that we have to say it to somebody. And unless you think your life and talents and fortunes are the products simply of natural law or good fortune or an accidental combination of molecules, then the presupposition is that in order to give thanks, you have to give it to God.

This may be a holiday decreed by a secular government, but in order to be properly celebrated it has to be religious. And so first we must ask ourselves -- as the mixed multitude that we are -- do we have anything in common for which we together can give thanks to God?

I hope that you will not answer that question glibly or tritely. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that Thanksgiving in the U.S. has become "increasingly the business of congratulating the Almighty upon his most excellent co-workers, ourselves." There is a lot of truth in that. We bombard the ears of God with thanks for our prosperity and comforts and way of life, but we secretly harbor the conviction that we have worked ourselves to a frazzle to get what we've got; our thanks, therefore, usually take on the ring of a lot of phony piety. We thank God for our standard of living, but way deep down we are sure it is the product of mostly our own hard work.