“I’ll be Home for Christmas”
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: Luke 15: 11-19
Repentance & Conversion
Change your mind
Last week as we talked about the Second Coming, we noted how the ongoing role of the Church is to call the world to repentance or conversion. This isn’t just trying to get people to say the Jesus prayer, but rather to live righteous lives. The call is to turn away from sin and darkness and turn toward the light of God in all things.
To be clear, repenting doesn’t make us righteous. Repentance is not a “good work” to secure our salvation but rather a response to the good news of God’s promises in Christ. There’s a vast difference between those two things, and we must get them right. So-called religious people imagine that by straightening themselves out and pursuing good behavior, they earn—or become deserving of—God’s favor. This doesn’t seem right. The steering wheel is not in our hands when it comes to righteousness. We don’t earn God’s favor, nor can we ever deserve it. Doing good and hating evil is not a strategy to secure God’s favor, and we should not think of it that way. Instead, repentance or conversion is entirely a response to the good news of our salvation in Christ. We turn from living for ourselves to living for Christ, and we do so in gratitude for the good he does on our behalf. We are all in the process of conversion from worldly, self-serving egotism to heavenly—even Christlike—love.
I’ll remind you that the biblical word is metanoia, which means both repent and convert. All the biblical calls to repentance are calls to metanoia. All talk of conversion or converting is the same metanoia. Most literally, metanoia means “transformed mind,” which fits in well with Romans 12: 2:
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
This is Paul’s call to repentance—his call to conversion. It is a calling to change one’s mind. What could be simpler? And what could be more complicated?
Mind Changing
Now a leading cause of taking offense
Right now, as we look at the culture around us, we see a hardened polarization of perspectives and worldviews. Political extremes grow more extreme; people are far more easily offended by the slightest of slights and speedy to litigate their vengeance. You can now be sued for using the wrong pronoun.
As a former English major, I would have loved the idea of fining people for atrocious abuses of language, but in my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined today’s landscape.
It may be harder today than ever to try and change someone else’s mind. It’s difficult because people refuse to distinguish between opinions and identity. To question someone else’s thinking is now tantamount to insulting their identity. The call to repentance —to think differently about oneself and the world—could soon be criticized as a violation against another’s personal autonomy. “I’m so offended that you disagree with me that I’m going to sue you for abuse!”
Is the call to repentance offensive? Perhaps it is—especially when it is done right—because neither the truth nor the gospel accommodate themselves to our personal preferences. It does not and cannot be changed to fit us; we must change to accommodate it. Minds must be changed. The call to conversion must go on unabated.
It’s one thing to dislike the Church—Christians, and preachers—because they are hypocritical. It’s another thing to dislike them because they expect people to change their minds, hearts, and lives. People hate repentance because they don’t want to change—they hate any change of which they are not the author—but that is the crucial point: we are not the author, God is, and the sooner we wake up to that fact, the sooner we can live as we are designed and intended to live.
Repentance is not just about feeling bad about sins—that’s really the least of it—it’s more about what we do after we are done feeling bad about our sins, namely, turning toward home.
The Prodigal Son Repents
“he came to himself”
The perfect image of repentance comes from Christ Himself in the parable of the Prodigal Son. In this story, we see repentance as a turning toward home.
In the story, the younger of the two sons seems to be hating his life. He’s sick of work, sick of his older brother, and dying for some adventure. In an act of unsurpassable nerve, he goes to his father and says, “You know Dad, someday you’re going to die, and then I’ll get my inheritance. Well, I’m sick of waiting. Could you give me now what I’m likely to receive when you die?” In not so many words, he’s saying, “I wish you were dead so I could have your money, so could I just have the money anyway?”
The stranger thing is that the father agrees. He counts up his net worth and pays it to his two sons.
The younger son takes his inheritance—effectively disowning his family—and heads to the ancient equivalent of Las Vegas. He fools around for a few months, and while he’s still up on his game, he invests heavily in a pyramid scheme. Soon everything is gone. In his own strength, he is ruined.
Does he come to his senses? Does he say, “Wow, I’ve really blown it—I’ll go home to Dad and start over.” No, not yet. Apparently, he still had lots of pride working. So he hires himself out to a Gentile. To make it worse, he has to feed the pigs. Even worse, he envies the pigs for the slop they’re eating. This is the ultimate bottoming out for a Jew—willingly making himself a slave to pigs.
And then we get this great and simple phrase in verse 17: “he came to himself.” How does this happen? He awoke to his situation in a flash and took back control of his life. Hunger and misery brought him to the end of himself. As soon as he was there, he realized it wasn’t the end at all—just the end of his foolishness.
“My father’s ranch hands—though lowly—eat well. I will go back and live—not in the house—but the bunkhouse or barn. Even at the bottom rung, my life will be okay.”
This is humility: to “come to oneself” is to come to the end of oneself. The end of pride, the end of ego, and the end of self-absorption. He would go back on his knees, never expecting to be restored as a son, but to live well-enough as the bottom dweller of the household totem pole. He plans to say:
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” —v. 18b
He leaves the pigs and turns toward home. This is repentance—turning toward our true home. This is a good way for us to think about repentance. Was he really sorry for his sins? Unknown, perhaps irrelevant. Is he only turning back because he was broke and hungry? Maybe, but apparently, that’s okay because it was good enough for his father.
Someone is thinking, “But something seems wrong here—shouldn’t repentance be about deep sorrow over our sinfulness? Doesn’t he have to show some kind of deep remorse for having insulted his family and offending his father?” What exactly is it in us that wants to see this—this morose groveling over sin?
Most of the Church’s literature about repentance focuses on this psychological aspect—this consuming contrition for sin—but we don’t see it anywhere in Jesus’ own parable to illustrate repentance. It is enough—everything—that the son heads home in the right state of mind.
To repent is to have a transformed, changed mind.
Turning Toward Home
I’ll be home for Christmas
While there is sorrow over our sin at the heart of repentance, there is something else more important: that longing for home that draws the human spirit. While feeding the pigs, what was on the younger son’s mind? How did his hated family and home appear in his mind then? A comfortable house, a big table with plenty of food, laughter with his older brother, his father’s love—we know exactly how it looked; it looked like Heaven. In the end, the longing for home—even in the bunkhouse at lowest rung—drew him.
I want to share what must be my most powerful longing for home moment. I hope in sharing it that you find something similar that resonates for you.
First semester freshman year of college—my home was in Omaha, and Gonzaga is in Spokane, Washington—a distance of 1,377 miles. I had never been further from home and never longer than a week at camp. The lessons were many, but Spokane was very snowy as we made it into that first December. There was a foot of snow on the ground by December 5th. Funny thing about Gonzaga: its most famous alum isn’t a brilliant scholar, gifted writer, or renowned athlete—but rather a musician who dropped out after two years. Bing Crosby.
Like any college campus, you could hear music pumping out of the dorm windows at about any time of the day or night. It was lots of Van Halen, Talking Heads, and the tail end of Led Zeppelin in my era. But at Gonzaga, in December, everybody played Bing. That’s right—the metalheads, the cowboys, the artists, and the teenyboppers—all set aside their standard fare for Bing Crosby. One song, in particular, got to me. You see, my Dad and his twin brother went to Gonzaga—they played basketball and tennis. They were graduates number one and two of the first class to graduate from the School of Engineering. 1939. Then they went to war in World War II. On those snowy nights in December, I imagined my father in December of 1943 trudging through the deep snow in France, wondering whether he would ever see home again. I trudged through the snow, worried over upcoming finals and final papers now due.
The song is “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” and it is sung from the point of view of a soldier at war. The melodic longing of a man stuck far away from home and hoping (though not optimistically) to return for Christmas spoke not only to the soldiers serving on the front lines but their loved ones on the home front as well. My father must have had that song in his head in December of ’44, and it was in my head nonstop the December of ’78. I missed home. I missed my parents and longed for home and family with homesickness I had never known before.
Home—the house in Omaha—was like Heaven to me. I was going to see my family, hang out with my old friends, and eat, drink, and be merry until I had to return for the second semester. I was living for home. I struggled through finals, pulling all-nighter writing binges—all fueled by the thought and longing for home.
The snows kept falling and picked off one final after another. I was going to be flying home—the first time I’d been on a plane—and when I went to the airport, all flights were canceled. I was stuck in the Spokane airport dreaming of home, longing for home. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” I thought, “if only in my dreams.” I did make it home, albeit two days late, and it was, perhaps, the greatest Christmas ever.
To long for home and to feel eager to return is the picture of repentance Jesus gives us. Home is where we are loved, whether we deserve it or not. Home is the place we belong despite our shortcomings and imperfections. Home is where love rules. Home is the place of full refrigerators and a sparkling, welcoming dining room table. Thick, creamy eggnog, sticky cinnamon rolls, a big Christmas tree glimmering with lights and tinsel, a fire in the fireplace, and friends showing up at the door to say hello. Fifteen inches of cold snow outside; hot cocoa and Christmas music inside.
Home: rest, reassurance, healing, wholeness.
The Home Attitude
Despite the wind, we’re headed for home
One final image of repentance. Pilots of planes or spacecraft have a great term we should all know and use: attitude. Flight attitude is one’s orientation toward the horizon. The wind may be blowing the plane sideways, but the attitude is the corrections of pitch, roll, and yaw relative to the horizon.
It doesn’t matter how hard the wind is blowing—our attitude points us home.
Repentance is more than a changed mind; it is a re-oriented attitude. A new spot on the horizon shapes our focus, attention, and service.
The Christian life is not about making ourselves righteous. Again, when we repent, we are not establishing a good relationship between ourselves and God, but rather we are responding to what God has done in Christ to redeem our relationship with Him. What we do is make daily attitude adjustments, focused as we are on the horizon, where our true home is.
And, as with our earthly homes at Christmas, there is a table there at which Christ Himself presides. All of our souls’ longings and joys are fed and satisfied there. This table is a glimpse—a pale foretaste—of that coming meal at our true home.
Today, we trudge the snow with the soldiers of 1943, hoping and dreaming of being home by Christmas.
Home: rest, reassurance, healing, wholeness. Christ. †
Questions
- What are some of the different ways to think of “repentance”?
- 2. How does the idea of “returning home” differ from other notions of repentance?
- 3. Why are our attitudes more significant than our ideas?
- 4. What makes changing one’s attitude such a difficulty?
- 5. What attitude is your heart “at home” with?
- 6. How can changing our idea of home also change our attitude?
- 7. If our home is in Heaven, how might our attitudes change?