The opening lines of Howard Thurman’s famous Christmas poem beautifully describe where we need to find ourselves now that Christmas is over:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins.

And there is great wisdom in these words of Howard Thurman. For the end of Christmas calls us to begin a new endeavor. Thurman describes it this way:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner,
To teach the nations,
To bring Christ to all,
To make music in the heart.

I once had a friend who openly questioned why any parent in their right mind would bring their children to church. To him, church is where people learn to replace rational thinking with believing in irrational things. It is where people switch a healthy sense of self-esteem with a crippling kind of self-doubt It is where compassion toward others is transformed into loveless  judgment and intolerance. Furthermore, my friend argued, church is where people are taught to depend upon useless myths, serving only to provide a psychological crutch for putting up with the difficult complexities of life.

And yet, one day, when we were talking about this dilemma of his – just after I had returned with a group of spirited teenagers from a mission/work trip in the Cumberland mountains of Tennessee – I asked him if he might reconsider.

Then I shared with him about how our kids had expressed their faith in Christ by spending a week living among and getting to know the people who live in the little mountain hollow where we worked – how they had helped build a house and do some repair work – how they had seen with their own eyes the reality of true poverty, and come to a better understanding of what poverty is – and, most importantly, how they had come to believe that the people among whom they had lived and worked for a week were, in many ways, blessed by God and, in some cases, far richer than they were.

Then I asked my friend why he wouldn’t want his own kids to have a church-experience like that?

And he didn’t know what to say.

You see, many people don’t really understand Christianity. Many people don’t really understand the Church. And many people don’t really understand Christmas!

They get so caught up with stars and angels, with their own religiously-related psychological struggles, and with occasional local manifestations of religion-gone-bad that they sometimes miss the whole point!

For the heart of the matter is that:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins.

And make no mistake about it, the work of Christmas is this:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To teach the nations,
To bring Christ to all,
To make music in the heart.

Now, who in their right mind, would be opposed to that?