Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon at Canterbury Cathedral

London: December 26, 2009, (PCTV Newsdesk)

Dec 25th morning's reading from the Letter to the Hebrews begins with theboldest and most unambiguous statement possible of what's new anddifferent about Christmas. God has always been communicating withhumanity, in any number of ways; but what we need from God is more thanjust information. The climax of the story is the sending of a Son: whenall has been said and done on the level of information what still needsto be made clear to us is that the point of it all is relationship. Godspeaks at last through a Son, so that we can grasp the fact that reallyknowing God, really responding to his Word of promise and life, is amatter of relationship. It's becoming God's child. And the consequenceis that we ourselves learn to speak and act in such a way that otherswant to share that relationship.

The Son, says the writer to the Hebrews, is the heir of all creation;the Son is the lifegiving principle of all reality; the Son radiates andreflects the unimaginable beauty and light of the source from which hecomes. When the Son is born among us, what happens is that thisunlimited, unending torrent of light and glory, of intelligence andorder and loving contemplation is poured into the container of a humanmind and body. Through what he then does in that human mind and body,the possibilities for human life are changed for ever, and we areinvited into the same place in heaven that the Son occupies for ever -the place that St John's gospel defines as ' nearest to the Father'sheart'. And the letter-writer triumphantly claims that our human destinyis thus to be even closer to God than the angels are. Christian poetsand thinkers have often imagined the angels looking at us with amazement- such very unpromising material, such limited capacities, such a geniusfor self-deception and pettiness, yet promised such a future.

Relationship is the new thing at Christmas, the new possibility of beingrelated to God as Jesus was and is. But here's the catch and thechallenge. To come into this glorious future is to learn how to bedependent on God. And that word tends to have a chilly feel for us,especially us who are proudly independent moderns. We speak of'dependent' characters with pity and concern; we think of 'dependency'on drugs and alcohol; we worry about the 'dependent' mind set that canbe created by handouts to the destitute. In other words, we think ofdependency as something passive and less than free.

But let's turn this round for a moment. If we think of being dependenton the air we breathe, or the food we eat, things look different. Evenmore if we remind ourselves that we depend on our parents for learninghow to speak and act and above all how to love. There is a dependencethat is about simply receiving what we need to live; there is adependence that is about how we learn and grow. And part of our humanproblem is that we mix up this entirely appropriate and lifegivingdependency with the passivity that can enslave us. In seeking (quiterightly) trying to avoid passivity we can get trapped in the fantasythat we don't need to receive and to learn.

Which is why it matters that our reading portrays the Son in the way itdoes - radiant, creative, overflowing with life and intelligence. TheSon is all these things because he is dependent, because he receives hislife from the Father. And when we finally grow up in to the fullness ofhis life, we shall, like him, be gladly and unashamedly dependent - opento receiving all God has to give, open to learn all he has to teach.This is a 'dependency' that is utterly creative and the very opposite ofpassive. It is a matter of being aligned with the freest activity we canimagine, God's eternal love, flowing through us.

At some level we all recognise this, because we've all seen somethinglike it at work in our family lives and even our closest friendships.Depending on each other, receiving and learning, are natural things,natural expression of closeness and trust. Yet we have over the longmillennia of human existence created a whole culture in which there is abasic impatience about learning - we want to get to the point where wecan say, OK that's enough, I know what I need to know - and aboutreceiving - we don't want to be indebted to others, we want to stand onour own two feet. Like many in this congregation, I suspect, I can hearvoices from my parents' and grandparents' generation saying they don'twant charity, they don't want to be beholden, they don't want handoutsfrom the state or anywhere else. There's something brave and admirableabout much of this when what it represents is a generous unwillingnessto burden others. But it can also reflect a stubborn hankering after alife that is under my management and doesn't need support from outside.

One of the worst effects of this culture of impatience and pride is whatit does to those who are most obviously dependent - the elderly, thosewith physical or psychological challenges and disabilities, and, ofcourse, children. We send out the message that if you're not standing onyour own two feet and if you need regular support, you're an anomaly.We'll look after you (with a bit of a sigh), but frankly it's not ideal.And in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you intoactive little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall testyou relentlessly in schools, we shall bombard you with advertising,often highly sexualised advertising, we shall worry you about yourprospects and skills from the word go; we shall do all we can to makechildhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the realthing - which is 'independence', turning you into a useful cog in thesocial machine that won't need too much maintenance.

In the last year, the issues around how we regard childhood in oursociety have been opened up for discussion with new intensity by anumber of important pieces of research like the Children's Society'sGood Childhood report or the Cambridge Review of primary education.There has at last been a wake-up call about the ways in which we arecrushing and narrowing children's experience; and there is a long andsignificant agenda there for debate in the months ahead.

But behind the details, there is one central issue. Can we as a societyaccept and even celebrate the fact that there is a place for proper andmature dependence - that human beings need to receive and learn: not sothat they can get to the point where they stop receiving and learning,but so that they can acquire the habits of receiving and learning inever-new settings? Can we help children enjoy their dependency so thatthey don't just leave it behind but get to manage it with freedom andimagination as they grow older?

And that involves two difficult lessons for us adults. One is simply toreconnect ourselves to our own capacity to receive and learn with joyand excitement - to become like little children, as Somebody once said.The other is to be ready to give the nurture and security that childrenneed - to create the safe places where they can learn, where they canmake their mistakes. To do this is to show that we treasure dependencyand that we shan't either exploit it or ignore it. Embracing andcelebrating our own dependence gives us the vision and energy to makesure that others have the freedom to make the most of their dependencetoo. And this means working to give all the children of the world thesecurity they need.

In our own society, there are problems enough - children who have neverknown stability in their family life, who have never known a father orwho have been pushed into taking responsibility for a parent or forbrothers and sisters, with a mother who is ailing, addicted or otherwiseincapacitated; children with workaholic parents, materially well off butdeprived of warmth and relaxation with their family; worse still,children and young people who are systematically exploited through sextrafficking, children who are trapped in gang culture. Worldwide, allthese problems and more are all too visible; perhaps one of the mostappalling phenomena, still affecting hundreds of thousands of children,is the exploiting of children in the meaningless and savage civil warsin places like Congo and Sri Lanka - children who are abducted,brutalised, turned into killers, used as sex slaves. To hear of theseexperiences is almost unbearable, yet the scandal continues.

These children are created, like all of us, to become fully andconsciously children of God, to enjoy that glory we reflected on a fewminutes ago. Their suffering is an insult to the purpose of God, acontemptuous refusal of the gift of God on the part of those who keepthem in their different kinds of slavery. God's gift at Christmas isrelationship, not just another human relationship but relation to Godthe Father by standing where Jesus stands, standing in the full torrentof his love and creativity, giving and receiving. To come into thatplace and to be rooted and grounded there means letting go of our fearof dependence and opening our hearts to be fed and enlarged andtransformed. And that in turn means looking at how we handle dependencein ourselves and others, how we accept the positive dependence involvedin lifelong learning and growing, and help one another deal with itpositively.

So the important thing is not that everyone gets to stand on their owntwo feet and turns into a reliable 'independent' consumer andcontributor to the GNP. What we expect from each other in a generous andgrown-up society is much more to do with all of us learning how to askfrom each other, how to receive from each other, how to depend on thegenerosity of those who love us and stand alongside us. And that againmeans a particular care for those who need us most, who need us tosecure their place and guarantee that there is nourishment and stabilityfor them. As we learn how to be gratefully dependent, we learn how toattend to and respond to the dependence of others. Perhaps by God'sgrace we shall learn in this way how to create a society in which realdependence is celebrated and safeguarded, not regarded withembarrassment or abused by the powerful and greedy.

God has spoken through a Son. He has called us all to become children atthe cradle of the Son, the Word made flesh, so that we may grow into aglory that even the angels wonder at. To all who accept him he givespower and authority to become children of God, learning and growing intoendless life and joy.