Worst of all, our thanksgiving in America becomes too often a callous indifference toward our neighbors. We give thanks over the turkey on our laden tables, when a few blocks away an elderly widow is dying of malnutrition. We rejoice in the bounty of our enormous harvests while two-thirds of the world will go to bed hungry tonight. And our prayers must sound to God like the prayer of that self-righteous Pharisee in Jesus' parable: "O God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are ..." -- hungry, ill-clad, wretched, homeless. It is scarcely a proper Christian prayer.

So the question remains, for what can you and I together give thanks to God? I do not think when we answer that that we should try to blur the distinctions between us, either. You really do not unite people by pretending they are all alike, when, in fact, they are really very different. And all of us are very different from one another indeed.

I have often been advised when speaking in a Jewish setting to preach only from the Old Testament, but that is phony, too, is it not, because that is not the nature of my religion. Our Jewish brethren know their God primarily through the marvelous gift of the Torah. We Christians find Him and can give thanks to Him only through Jesus of Nazareth. So it is no good pretending that those are not the facts of the matter when we come together to give thanks. And the question remains, for what can we all together here today give thanks to Almighty God? Just what exactly do all of us have in common?

Could it be that we are one here today because all of us suffer -- because in one way or another every one of us has some private or not so private hurt? In the last month, I have visited a friend recovering from surgery for cancer, and commiserated with a young mother who has just been divorced, and worried over some everyday problems with my own family, and lost a dear friend to death. But that is nothing unusual. You have all suffered those things, either in your own lives or in the lives of loved ones, if not in the past month then in some other; if not all at one time then over a span of time.

We all hurt. We all grieve and we all worry; we all know pain and anguish. We all suffer the loss that death brings and the wounds that life inflicts upon us. As a German cook, who was trying to get a job during World War II, put it to a dubious employer, "We weep the same tears, Madam." We weep the same tears. The biography of us could read, "They were born. They suffered. They died."

We are bound together here today by our common suffering, and while that may seem a gloomy statement to make on a Thanksgiving Day, it is simply a recognition of the way human life really is. Of course we all have our moments of joy and times of triumph and gladness, but we sometimes rejoice over very different things, do we not? It is our suffering that binds us all together in the bundle of life.

There is another matter we all have in common, however: Our God has stooped down to ease the burden of suffering of us all. "I have seen the affliction of my people ... and I have come down to deliver them," He told Moses. "And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant ... and God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition."