Year A: Proper 19 | The People Are the Gifts
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
September 13, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Deacon Phil, Mother Jeanne, and I—along with several of our guests this morning—spent much of this past week at our Diocesan Clergy Conference. Once each year the Bishop gathers all the priests and deacons of the Diocese of the Rio Grande for several days of interaction and a sort-of reorientation, helping us align our focus and ministries. Clergy everywhere from Farmington to Marfa meet together at the Holy Cross Retreat Center just south of town for prayer, learning, and discussion.
This year the focus was, broadly speaking, on anxiety—society’s growing political anxieties, people’s worries how AI will affect our future, and parish concerns about what their church even is when they not only can’t afford a priest but can no longer cover basic costs, like keeping the lights on. And those all are real worries. Social and economic turmoil that’s been gathering strength throughout my adulthood has whipped itself to new levels under the existential fear of what will happen to us as humans should technology take away what had been secure livelihoods or displace us entirely. In a culture under which, for generations, one’s job and one’s identity have been indistinguishable, where self-determination and independence have been core virtues, and where one’s value is largely determined by productivity and economic output, it’s hard to imagine a world beyond those established expectations.
As we listened and discussed various scenarios with one another, something from our Diocesan Vocations Course kept coming back to my mind. There’s a passage in Ephesians that, in the context of gifts God offers, says, “He himself granted that some are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”[1] While Modern American Christianity has taught us to think of “spiritual gifts” as a sort of comic book-style mystical or supernatural empowerment, Bishop Michael uses this verse to point out something nearly everyone misses. These gifts aren’t special skills like tongues or prophecy; they aren’t magical endowments of faith or knowledge or foresight. Rather, he emphasizes to our discerners that “the people are the gifts.”
“The people are the gifts.”
In a time of disruption and rapidly encroaching change, I wonder if that statement might not be a guiding light. We as the Church have spent generations focused on buildings and wealth and social capital. We look to numbers like attendance and funerals and budgeting as signs of congregational health. It makes sense. Culturally, much of the Church is still rooted in Christendom—the union of Church and State. For nearly 1600 years the Church was the charitable branch of government. The state paid for its buildings and its services and its staffing. In turn, the Church legitimized and blessed—“sanctified,” one might say—policy and power and status. Even with the founding of the United States as the first official non-Christian Western nation in roughly 1,000 years, we never quite broke out of that mold—hence the emphasis on nongovernmental organizations and “faith-based” charity as the method of caring for our poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Power has been the gift. Buildings have been the gift. Money and influence have been the gift. The people, however, were largely irrelevant, except maybe as cogs to ensure the system continued to perpetuate itself.
But maybe we’re starting to see hints of a new world. And maybe all the changes happening around us, fearful though they appear, are finally clearing away the millennia of dirt and debris that have kept us from establishing our identity on bedrock reality. For just as the people are the gifts, it’s becoming clear again that the people are also the Church.
Facilities are helpful to have, but the Church has not always housed itself in specialized structures; therefore, the Church is not the building. Programs and organized outreach are excellent ways to serve and share the Gospel, but the Church has not always had the privilege of that sort of organization or public exposure; therefore, the Church is not its ministries. In our tradition, clergy are central to consecration of the Sacraments; however, not all congregations have always had ready access to priests or “real presence” of Christ’s body and blood; therefore, neither the clergy nor even the Sacraments are the Church! It turns out that, just as the people are the gifts, the people are the Church.
Maybe that’s the “why” behind our readings this morning. Clearly the Lectionary wants us to focus on acceptance and forgiveness, but honestly, it’s hard to see anything in our passages of value in the eyes of modern society. After all, what’s in any of it for me? What does forgiveness get me other than the potential of forgiveness for myself, should I someday need it? What does tolerance or inclusion offer beyond the distant prospect of my own opportunity to be tolerated or included? All of those actions have an immediate cost while none of them give us comfort or convenience or power or money here and now. They might lay the foundations for some kind of moral debt we can manipulate to our own advantages somewhere down the line. But as far as the kinds of things society has taught us to long and live for, neither forgiveness nor its associates offer modern Americans very much.
But what happens if we readjust our focus and take seriously the idea that “the people are the gifts”? If that’s truly the case, then forgiveness and tolerance and inclusion and equality do offer us something—something so valuable it may be impossible to measure. They maintain and restore direct access to gifts God has offered us, perfect gifts housed in the guise of God’s own imperfect children.
So, instead of seeing value in the social connections and economic opportunities and power dynamics we can exploit from other people, what might happen if we start to truly appreciate one another as gifts from God—gifts that not only help us to build God’s Kingdom, but gifts that actually comprise God’s Kingdom?
Can anyone truly begrudge a gift freely given? (I’m not talking about the kind of “gifts” we receive as tchotchkes or that come along with purchases or that act as repayment for earlier social debts. I’m talking about something that’s completely unexpected yet genuinely thoughtful and useful—that kind of gift that surprises and delights and reminds you of the giver each time you use or cherish it for years on end.) If the people truly are the gifts, then our relationships with one another become far more valuable than any financial costs or squabbles over preferences or divisions regarding principle or practice. If the people are the Church, we can maintain a coherent identity even in the face of loss of status, tight budgets, and stresses to our facilities. When the people are the gifts—and especially when the people actively embrace one another as the Church—we can begin to approach an uncertain future with less fear.
As we come together and share our talents and skills, what had been isolated burdens may transform into partnerships. As we approach one another carrying curiosity, engaging one another’s stories and experiences rather than expressing postures of defensiveness, greed, or suspicion, we can both cultivate our individual growth and expand our communal experience of the world. As we encounter each other with open eyes, exposing ourselves to each person’s varied fullness rather than reducing one another to roles as providers of certain goods or gatekeepers of particular functions, we can reassess our priorities and begin to find value in connection and community, not only in our own and others’ strengths but in our humanity itself.
The people are the gifts. May we learn to see each other as such.
The people are the Church. May we finally embrace the full po
[1] Ephesians 4:11-12 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.