Earlier this year our church’s leadership teams started planning to celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving and Pentecost on the same Sunday. One of my first thoughts was to wonder how I would preach on two important festivals in the one message. We celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving to acknowledge God as the giver of all good things, including our livelihoods and the fruit of our work, and to remember that he wants us to share the blessings he gives us with others. Pentecost is important because it marks the beginning of the Christian Church, and we celebrate God’s gift of his Holy Spirit to each of us.
Is there a connection between these two festivals? How might God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to us intersect with giving thanks for God’s blessings to us and sharing them with others?
One of the great Christian thinkers of the early Church was Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430). He described our human condition as being curved in on ourselves. By this Augustine meant that our natural inclination is to focus on ourselves and what we get more than on God or other people. He described this inward focus as sin because it is the opposite of Jesus’ teachings on faith in God and love for others which are all focused outwards, beyond ourselves. The problem with living in ways that are curved in on ourselves is that ultimately they are harmful for our own well-being as well as our relationships with others.
If we think of ‘sin’ as being curved in ourselves, then ‘salvation’ can be understood as being set free from an inward inclination as God draws us out of ourselves and directs the focus of our lives towards himself in faith and towards others in love. God makes this change in us by the Holy Spirit through the gospel. When we hear the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for us, the Holy Spirit works through the gospel to lift our focus from ourselves to the cross and empty tomb of Jesus. This is why the Apostle Paul writes that the Good News of Jesus, or the message of the cross, is the power of God to save us (Romans 1:16; 1 Corinthians 1:18,24). As the Holy Spirit shifts the focus of our lives towards Jesus through the gospel, we see God’s liberating and life-giving love for us which completely changes the way we see ourselves, our place in the world, and the people around us. Faith in Jesus sets us free from having to worry about ourselves because the Holy Spirit gives us the ability to trust in God’s goodness which we encounter in Jesus, and to rely on him for everything we need for life in this world and the next.
The prophet Ezekiel used these words to describe this shift from being focused on self to focused on God and others:
And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart. (Ezekiel 36:26 NLT)
This ‘new spirit’ God promises to give us is the Holy Spirit which we celebrate today on the Festival of Pentecost. As the Holy Spirit makes his home in us, God’s Spirit becomes one with our spirit, renewing it, giving it life, and shifting its focus. The Holy Spirit takes our hearts which can be hard, stony and stubborn in our self-focus, and softens them, making them tender and responsive to God’s love for us through the Gospel of Jesus. Augustine talked about this change of heart by talking about the focus of our lives. Ezekiel talked about it in terms of our hearts being made soft and tender. Both images are different ways of describing the change the Holy Spirit makes in our lives through the good news of Jesus.
As the Holy Spirit lifts our gaze from ourselves towards Jesus through the gospel, we start to see other people, their needs, and the ways we can bless them by sharing God’s good gifts with them. Instead of focusing on ourselves and what we can get from others, the Holy Spirit gives us the capacity to focus on others and what we can give to them. These offerings, the good gifts we can offer to others, become our gifts of thanks to God for his goodness to us in Jesus. This is the link between Pentecost and Harvest Thanksgiving: Firstly, the gift of the Holy Spirit shifts our focus towards our loving God so we can see the crops, fruits and produce we harvest as gifts he freely gives us for the sake of Jesus. Secondly, as we trust in God’s grace-filled goodness through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can give thanks to him for his goodness to us by giving what he has first given us to others.
The Holy Spirit’s shift in focus from ourselves towards God in faith and others in love is something that shapes our whole lives. Giving thanks isn’t just something we do on a Sunday at the end of harvest. It is an attitude the Holy Spirit is constantly re-creating within us through faith in the good news of Jesus. We set aside a special Sunday each year to recognize and celebrate the ways in which God provides for our physical needs and livelihoods, but God calls us to have an attitude of thanksgiving every day of our lives. Whenever we give our offerings to God in worship, we celebrate a mini-harvest thanksgiving. Whenever we invite someone over for a cuppa or to share a meal, we celebrate a mini-harvest thanksgiving. Whenever we make a donation to a charity, buy a sausage to support a local community group, or share what God has given to us with others in any way, we give thanks to God for his abundant blessings to us. Everything we do through faith in Jesus with thankful hearts is the Holy Spirit working in us, giving us tender hearts that are focused on others to extend God’s blessings in the world.
All of this is through the power of the Holy Spirit which God poured out on his people at Pentecost. Today, we don’t just remember the historical event of the first Pentecost, but God continues what he began at Pentecost by pouring out his Spirit on us to make our hearts tender and responsive to his love for us in Jesus. In Acts 2, God worked a miracle in the disciples’ lives by giving them the ability to speak in other languages. Today, the Holy Spirit is still at work by lifting our eyes from ourselves to see God’s goodness and grace in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus. At the same time the Spirit of God shows us the needs of the people around us and how we can give thanks for God’s goodness to us by sharing what God has provided to us with them, so they can encounter God’s goodness and grace in us. This Pentecost, we give thanks for all of God’s blessings to us in the faith the Holy Spirit creates, and we share what he has first given us with others as the Holy Spirit softens our hearts and shifts the focus of our lives through the gospel of Jesus.
More to think about or discuss:
- What is your reaction to the idea that people naturally focus more on ourselves than on God or other people? How can this self-focus lead to problems in our lives?
- Do you find it easy or difficult to focus your life on God’s love for us in Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection? How can the Holy Spirit re-focus our lives on this good news?
- How might the Holy Spirit help us to have an attitude of giving thanks in our lives by focusing our lives on Jesus?
Pastor Eugene Online 
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