Parish Retreat/10:00 am morning service this Sunday/Baroque Bonanza/Cisgender

Join us this Sunday! One 10:00 am morning service will take the place of our usual 9:00 am and 11:15 services. With so many of us away at the Parish Retreat, we'll have a smaller gathering at St. Mark's. The 5:00 pm service will take place as usual.

From Peter Sherer, Senior Warden

Dear Ones,

The all Parish Retreat is happening this weekend and we are busy framing the weekend for the people who are going and this article is a way for people who are unable to attend to see what we are talking about.

St Marks is packed with smart and caring people. Church membership experts tell us that people generally start to investigate church in a serious way in their early 30s. How do we attract people who are seeking a community? The millennial generation is 100 million strong (the baby boomers are only 78 million) and DC has the most millennials of any major city in the US. The oldest millennials are 30 this year which means we will have a steady stream of 30 year olds seekers. Our task is to understand what they need and provide attractive programs that reflect our values.

The construct IèweèWE is perhaps a helpful way of thinking about the nature of our community. This formula identifies that within St Mark's there are individual needs (I), community needs (we), and our collective responsibility to the wider world (We).

The focus on I represents a focus on us as individuals. It is concerned with the question how can I benefit from a relationship with St Marks? It was at the heart of the appeal of our Christian Education with its emphasis on one's own spiritual development. Many people at St Marks now in their 60s were attracted to the church in their 30s because it was not dogmatic and it held the promise of helping people to sort out a spiritual point of view to inform important decisions.

While spiritual development remains important, service and making a positive difference in the wider world, particularly in a green way, is a primary value for many. The question in the minds of many people in their 30s now is how can churches in general and St Mark's in particular make a positive impact in the world? Capital W We represents the idea of the church community as a body designed to influence institutional change. This would expand our current intelligent grant making through Outreach and our other helpful initiatives to feed the hungry to making our collective contribution to the wider world our primary collective focus.

In between I and capital W WE, is small w we, which represents the community of the church as a whole. This point of view pursues the question of what would benefit the whole of St Mark's? Bigger than an emphasis on what can I get from being part of St Mark's and smaller than how can St Mark's as a body change the world sits the concern for community development. This community-wide concern pursues questions like what can make us experience a stronger sense of belonging to a worthwhile group? What activities would bring us closer together? How can we organize and fund activities that create stronger friendships between people at St Mark's? How can we organize to take care of the needs of people in different age groups as disparate as needing the nursery to finding a place in the columbarium?

My own view is that we must be smart about including all three points along the continuum from I è we è WE. I think that preserving the best of our approach to spiritual development while we strengthen our community ties with each other is essential to create a strong platform to attract people who will expect us to take an active corporate role in the world. Moving along the continuum will constitute a major shift from an independent, self-oriented, consumerist approach in which there are a confederacy of interests in the church to a corporate identity that plays an enthusiastic and helpful role in the world.

A second focus of the weekend beyond strengthening our ties with each other will be on our need to attract new members.

The Vestry's priority last year was to find Michele and to integrate her into the life of the church. We are now turning our attention to the big strategic challenge facing St Marks and all religious denominations. That is figuring out how to attract people to St Marks from a generation that in general has neither the tradition nor interest in church-based religion.

Hugs

Peter

From Jeff Kempskie, Director of Music

Dear St. Mark's,

Starting next weekend, St. Mark's will host a series of six early music concerts titled Baroque Bonanza II. These concerts feature performances by many fabulous local musicians. On Friday, June 17th the Vivaldi Project will perform the Caldara cello concert in D minor and other string trios by Cannabich, Bach, and Vivaldi. More info at: thevivaldiproject.org. On Saturday, June 18th both Kleine Kammermusik and Modern Musick will perform French baroque music by Couperin, Marais, Rameau, and Lully. More info at: www.kleinekammermusik.com. The concert on Sunday, June 19th will feature performances by duo harpsichordists Vera Kochanowsky & Thomas MacCracken and the string trio Corda Nova. Both groups will perform music of the French baroque, including keyboard duos by Couperin and Rameau and Clérambault's dramatic cantata Médée. More info at: www.cordanova.org.

All concerts take place in the nave starting at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are available at the door ($25 general, $20 students/seniors). To view the June 24-26 concerts, visit the St. Mark's website.

Peace,

JEFF

From the Reverend R. Justice Schunior, Associate Rector

Friends,

If you were in church last Sunday, you might have heard the presiding priest add an extra phrase into the Eucharistic Prayer:"When he (Jesus) left his followers, she (the Spirit)was poured out on all flesh and crossed the boundary between male and female, slave and free, Jew and Gentile." Both Michele (at the 9:00 am) and I (at the 11:15) added "cisgender and transgender" to these categories of people whose boundaries had been crossed by the Spirit.

Cisgender might be a new word to some of you and that's because it's, in fact, a new word. While transgender has been in use since the 1970s to describe people whose gender identity is different from the gender they are assigned at birth, cisgender has only been in use since the 1990s (and then mostly in academic journals) to describe people who do identify with the gender with which they were assigned at birth. Clearly, people who experience match or mismatch have been around since the dawn of time, but sometimes it take lanugage a millenia or three to catch up.

Trans is the Latin prefix meaning "on the other side of" and cis is the Latin prefix meaning "on this side of". Cisgender is a useful word in that it allows those who don't experience any kind of mismatch between their assigned sex and their sense of their gender to realize their privilege. Those people are matched up as they feel they should be and go through life without having to make any kind of gender transition. It's also helpful to give us all more commonality - at the end of the day we're all just people, some of us are cis and some of us are trans. But we're all the same category - human.

However, there has been some pushback about the use of cisgender and not from the places one might think. Some feminists object to the word cisgender because it implies that cisgender women are more privileged than transwomen. Yet, transwomen don't have the same worries over reproductive rights, for example. Some in the gay community object to its use because they believe it is a slur. "Not queer enough" is what they hear when they are called cis. And still others object because it implies a binary - you are this or you are that - as opposed to the term "genderqueer" which implies that there is no binary, only ambiguity. Many view the human tendancy to divide everything and everyone into two categories to be neither charming nor illuminating.

At this point your head might be spinning and you might be wondering why your priests, who are supposed to be good spiritual guides, are trying to confuse you. We're not, I promise! We are trying to pay attention to the pain that the transgender community is feeling. Our Eucharistic Prayer quotes Paul's Letter to the Galations 3:28 "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." The categories we create to separate us from one another as a way to say who is in and who is out, those categories have no reality for God. So while our differences are vital and make us special, our categories of othering are meaningless in the inclusive, all encompassing love of God. Our language may be faulty and changeable, but this central gospel truth is our aim. We also pledge to learn more about how we can be good and effective allies to the trans community. If you can help us, let us know.

As always, if you have questions or concerns about the words we use in worship, please contact Michele or me. We would love to talk about it with you!

Peace,

Justi

Service Notes and Music

Prelude

No. 1 of Three Quiet Preludes, Gilbert Martin (b. 1941)

Opening Hymn

410 Praise, my soul, the King of heaven, Tune: Lauda anima

The Hebrew Scripture

1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a

The Gospel

Luke 7:36-8:3

Procession to the Baptismal Font

Take me to the water, African American Spiritual

Offertory Music

Still, Still with Thee, Words by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Music by John Ness Beck - Marika Klein, soloist

Presentation Hymn

382 King of glory, King of peace, Tune: General Seminary

Sanctus, Fraction Anthem, Peter Crisafulli

Music During Communion

Hymn 469 There's a wideness in God's mercy, Tune: Beecher

O Love, That Will Not Let Me Go, Words by George Matheson

Music by John Ness Beck - Marika Klein, soloist

Closing Hymn

Hymn 605 What does the Lord require, Tune: Sharpthorne

Postlude

Con Spirito, Thomas Arne (1710-1778)

Schedule of Services

June 12, 2016

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

10:00 am Holy Eucharist + Holy Baptism

The Reverend Rebecca Justice Schunior, Preacher & Presider

5:00 pm Contemplative Eucharist

The Reverend Rebecca Justice Schunior, Preacher & Presider

About the Gospel

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