In his Christmas message this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, speaks of his recent visit to Palestine:And what stuck in my mind and I’m sure the minds of my colleagues was a remark made by Dr Robert Tabash, the medical director as we stood over an incubator in the intensive ward. All of this was important, he said, simply because ‘the poorest deserve the best’ (I promised I would quote him today by name; it’s the least I can do to give him the honour he merits). ‘The poorest deserve the best’: when you hear that, I wonder if you can take in just how revolutionary it is. They do not deserve what’s left over when the more prosperous have had their fill, or what can be patched together on a minimal budget as some sort of damage limitation. And they don’t ‘deserve’ the best because they’ve worked for it and everyone agrees they’ve earned it. They deserve it simply because their need is what it is and because where human dignity is least obvious it’s most important to make a fuss about it. And – to put it as plainly as possible – this is probably the most radically unique and new thing in Christmas itself brings into the world.
Read the complete sermon for a brilliant reminder that Christmas is about more than presents or even remembering an ancient birth. It is about transforming our lives and our world today.
What church has been 'taken away'...? The Episcopal Church of the 1950s? That church which forbade women deputies to General Convention? Or an earlier Episcopal Church, where divorce was all but forbidden, except in cases of adultery? Where remarriage was impossible, even for the innocent party? Perhaps the church that was taken away was the atmosphere and ethos of the mid-19th-century Church of England, where marriage to a deceased wife's sister was forbidden and punishable by law? Or the mid-19th century American church that turned a blind eye to the practice of slavery? 
