A block away from my office is University Church, which you can tell has liberals in the pews because there are signs all over the outside about how you should love everybody because Jesus did, you should be the light, and other phrases importuning people to behave as good, nondiscriminatory Christians.
According to its website, University Church does have a denomination but also appears to be rather eclectic. After all, it is right at the edge of the University of Chicago, and if you want butts in the pews, you have to be averse to dogma. Their statement:
We belong to both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and United Church of Christ denominations, and much of our community comes from many other traditions as well. No two Sundays are the same here, and below will show you a bit more about who we are and how we go about being a church.
Every week they post the title of the Sunday sermon, which is often something I do not understand. In such cases I call a good friend, one who used to be a Christian believer but has turned atheist. (I take some credit for that.) He can often explain to me the meaning of sermon titles such as the one I saw today:
Now my first thought about this title was that the phrase “It is what it is” has appeared in the “words and phrases I detest” posts, as it is irritating. In that sense, then, these are words that kill.
But of course it could not mean that. So I called my friend, read out the title of the sermon, and asked him what it meant. Here is his response
“It means that those people who accept the status quo are murderers”.
That was funny, but must be close to the real meaning of the sermon: it must be a call for change, even if you do not think change is possible. But what KIND of change? To find out, one would have to go to the sermon, and I am not prepared to set foot in a temple of mishigass.
I did find out, though, that not only are sermons always based on a bit of scripture, but there is also a cycle of scriptures every week that are the basis of sermons for all churches of a given denomination (sometimes they offer a choice). I did not know that, so I have learned something.
It is what it is.
A local church, branded “Word of Life Christian”, had at the head of their signboard for several months:
Pray God
Is Listening
After driving by it regularly for long enough to tire of the joke, I called and mentioned the concept of punctuation might help, as “I don’t think is says what you think it says”.
They changed it to
Pray
God is
Listening
which added ambiguity, but didn’t really change the message.
Church signboards can be very entertaining.
They shudda used a comma.
Catholic church on SR 200 in Ocala, FL, back in 2013 or so (when I lived there) had a roadside sign that read, “Let Jesus come inside you.” I remember thinking they obviously didn’t run that one past their younger parishioners.
I think it barely means anything. It’s just another way of pretending to say something that’s wise and thoughtful without saying anything meaningful at all. It’s much like the bulk of parables in the jebus cult’s handbook.
There are so many different flavors of Christianity it’s impossible to know for sure where the sermon-giver planned to go with that. “Let go and let God” is a popular Christian saying, implying one should stop stressing and assume God’s on top of it (whatever “it” is.)
Bill Clinton said it better imo.
“It depends on what your meaning of “is” is.”
Isn’t this just a lighter, more Christian style inflected version of “woke”?
Seems like it.
D.A.
NYC
Yep, I think that’s what they’re trying to do. It’s sort of taking “you can’t just stand by and let the white, patriarchal, racist, transphobic, systemic murderers get away with it” and coding it for a more mainstream audience.
Is that interpretation a bridge too far? Possibly. The professor’s friend reads this as being in reference to the “status quo”, but that could mean a lot of things. “Status quo” in reference to what? It could be very specific or very broad.
Today, I think many would agree that the status quo is most commonly attacked in the “woke” sense described above as a broad, malevolent societal construct, so I am inclined to think that’s where this church is heading.
Yes. Liberal churches are typically very “woke.”
“It is what it is” is declared words that kill, because it signals tolerance for every fascist bourgeois capitalist utterance-claim by any person, instead of the Marxist sledgehammer falling on wrong ideas.
This is inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s essay “Repressive tolerance. Here’s the summary of it via Grok…
In the essay, Marcuse argues that tolerance in liberal societies can paradoxically serve as a tool to maintain oppressive systems. He suggests that by tolerating all viewpoints, including those that are harmful or oppressive, society suppresses genuine dissent and perpetuates injustice. He advocates for “liberating tolerance,” which would involve intolerance toward oppressive ideologies to foster true social change.
So….
“It is what it is” is is a sin against Marcuse-Marx, and it kills because it sanctions tolerance of objectionable POV
Does it also kill flu and coronavirus?
If not, I’ll just stick to my Clorox product I’ve been using. Even has a foaming function!
Perhaps it is best that you skipped the sermon, Jerry! I looked up the church, and its website suggests a congregation of mostly progressives at prayer. It lacks the “What we believe” statements you would find at Evangelical churches, and it doesn’t post audio of the sermons, which is what I was looking for. There are several lectionary readings today from which they could choose; they selected one. It does, indeed, connect with the idea of change (a turning away from the status quo), and a minister could have taken this any direction his heart desired: spiritual repentance, political activism, and so on.
But the reading they selected is in the book of Jeremiah; it had a specific audience in Jeremiah’s time. Here is how AI characterizes it: Warning of Judgment: God communicates through Jeremiah that if the people of Israel turn from their wicked ways, they can be reshaped and restored. However, if they persist in their disobedience, they will face consequences.
As I said, that could have gone many directions! I’ll grant they have the grace to look inward in the application.
Update. I overlooked the church’s YouTube page where they post video of their services. It seems that “Words That Kill” is a series the minister started today about common words and phrases that he recommends we avoid, so I expect Jerry will see it again on the sign. After reading the scripture passage from Jeremiah about Israel, the preacher started rapping, and the third and fourth words out of his mouth were “Donald Trump.” But Trump was, in part, a prop. The minister reminded his congregation that 1990s rap has over 300 positive references to Trump before later railing a bit against Trump’s threatened actions in Chicago. His congregation, of course, applauded the notes of resistance, perhaps not realizing this wasn’t going to be his main point. The minister then shifted from Trump and the political and returned focus to the personal. Throughout the message he framed the phrase “It is what it is” as something that can help build in us resilience in accepting things we cannot change, but he cautioned against a fatalism that causes us to abandon, or “kill,” hope that circumstances and people can never change. He ended on a note about how “It is what it is” can also be no more than an excuse about ourselves that avoids self-reflection and avenues for personal growth. Overall, it was decently done.
If anyone is interested in hearing a young black minister on the outskirts of UChicago, his sermon is at 1:01:30-1:18:30. He comes across as a man who would be enjoyable to work with, but he needs to shift his baseball allegiances to the northern half of the city.
I bet the sermon is about Palestine. Of course every progressive talks about Palestine so it is not hard to guess.
Woah, this is cool! It means I’ve been doing my household cleaning chores all wrong, using wipes and cleaning product “guaranteed to kill up to 99.98% of germs including flu and coronavirus”
Now I can walk into my bathroom and simply say “OK, germs, you had it easy. But now, I have words. You will not survive. Leave now and there’ll be no trouble.”
I am sure I’ve posted this before, my favorite quote from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. This comes right after the accident and death that sets off the race for the money.
J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle): Take it easy. These things happen.
Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman): What kind of attitude is that, “these things happen”? They only happen because this country is full of people who, when things happen, just say, “These things happen,” and that’s why they happen!
My favourite (barely) relevant movie line is from Repo Man (1984): “It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.”
Never before of a congregation being member of two denominations.
10:23 Central Time this morning – “I’m too low to write any more posts today” J. Coyne…
2:37 pm “The Sunday Sermon” is posted on WEIT prompting more than a dozen responses.
Thank ya’ preacher for pulling our boy out of his funk today!
That was a cryptic title. We’ve all heard the phrase but are here left on our own to figure out what it might mean. Maybe it was simply a way to create curiosity and, thereby, attendance. No reader could possible know what it meant without attending the sermon.
I have seen the phrase(?) “GODISNOWHERE” used to illustrate how difficult it can be to translate and get the “true” meaning of an ancient text, particularly when the the text is all run together, with no spacing.
Although perhaps worded a little harshly, I took it as a variation of the saying often attributed to Eldridge Cleaver: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
Or the saying, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
What would the general reaction have been if these words had been on the sign? Are these useless, meaningless bromides to be scoffed at as well?
Science education content:
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”
https://www.teachengineering.org/activities/view/mis_pharma_lesson01_activity1
When things get bad, and you start thinking that the solution might be alcohol, remind yourself than alcohol is a compound. Beer is a solution.
Well, we each have our own tastes, but ever since I’ve been an adult, I’ve been rather fond of the phrase, “It is what it is”, and I use it quite often. It’s essentially a shorthand way of saying that there are lots of things in this world beyond our control, and nothing we can do will change the way those things are, least of all crying, complaining, or wishful thinking. The current situation simply is, and all we can do is control our own behaviors from here on out. It’s essentially the counter to playing “what if”, also related to that other cliche, “Don’t cry over spilled milk.”
But that’s a mouthful, so instead I say, “It is what it is,” to get across the meaning in a short saying that everyone recognizes.
(My wife just used it on me not too long ago when I was upset about something in my personal life that didn’t go the way I wanted, but in truth, there was nothing I could have done to have changed things. And her telling me, “It is what it is” was that impetus I needed to quit dwelling on the past and feeling sorry for myself and think about what I could actually do going forward.)
The cycle of scriptures every week common in Christian churches was, of course, borrowed from Jewish practice, the
Parsha ( פָּרָשַׁת הַשָּׁבוּעַ ). Or, put differently, it is what it was.