This may be the post that finally generates hate mail. In an effort to help you prepare your heart for Advent, I’m going to point out how two 1990s powerhouses got it wrong.
There are two modern ways of looking at the world: Seinfeld or Friends.
Two Mirrors
The theme of Friends is summed up in its theme song:
“I’ll be there for you.”
People are basically good and deserve our support as we each chase our dreams.
For example, in one episode, Phoebe is convinced that a cat is her deceased mother. Ross finds out it is instead a little girl’s missing pet featured in flyers throughout the neighborhood.
He attempts to give Phoebe the cold, hard truth, that she needs to stop living a fantasy and accept reality.
Phoebe then rebukes him: “You don’t know what it feels like when one of them [parents] comes back, do you? I believe this is my mother. Even if I’m wrong, who cares? Just be a friend, OK? Be supportive!”
Never mind that his judgment is sound. In fact, never mind that his advice is meant to help his friend deal with a possible mental health issue. He immediately folds and apologizes to Phoebe–and to the cat.
Tolerance and support are the supreme virtues.
The theme of Seinfeld is summed up in the final season’s scene where Jerry and George attempt to pitch their life as a TV show:
“The show is about nothing. … But even nothing is something.”
Life is meaningless, people are selfish and laughing at absurdity is all we have left.
In one episode, Jerry, attempting to bed a cop, lies about watching the evening soap Melrose Place.
Hilarity ensues as Jerry finds himself preparing to take a polygraph test to prove he doesn’t watch the soap.
George, who has spent the episode lying about his baldness in the form of a toupee, prepares Jerry:
“Just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
Given the show’s postmodern spirit, he might have added: “And who cares if you lie, anyway?”
Relationships
The two shows have incredibly different approaches to life.
But both revolve around perpetually young singles attempting to sleep with an impressively long roster of people.
And both worlds, I think, would be nightmares to live out in real life.
The Friends characters sleep around seeking true love and what scholars might call self-actualization. As the creators stated in their treatment pitching the show to NBC:
“It’s about sex, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when everything’s possible. And it’s about friendship because when you’re single and in the city, your friends are your family.”
“Everything’s possible.” But assuming you’re not in a wrap-it-up-in-the-next-30-minutes storybook romance or career, the best Friends says you can do is settle for an urban tribe.
The Seinfeld characters are also an urban tribe. And the Friends tribe comes off as shallow compared to them. Friends offers warm, comedic fuzzies. Seinfeld offers sophisticated absurdities.
It is, perhaps, a uniquely Jewish way of approaching the world. As Mel Brooks said:
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Comedy and self-deprecation a la Seinfeld help us navigate tragedy, including postmodern existential crises.
Seinfeld’s characters stay intellectually honest, avoiding sentimentalism … but they also avoid true love. In fact, they regularly find themselves disgusted by their latest conquests.
Can you imagine real life being like that?
If you can … can you imagine finding it at all fulfilling?
Wisdom of the age
I find comedy a pure, if temporary, art form. I think there is much truth in it. We resonate with Seinfeld’s critique of the human situation and our self-centeredness.
We know something is not right.
But you don’t have to embrace the cynicism of Seinfeld any more than you do the sentimentality of Friends.
There is another way. As Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth puts it:
Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.
1 Corinthians 2:6
The mature–not the world-weary and cynical–may receive wisdom. But it will not be a wisdom of this age.
It will be much older. Eternal.
Fulfilling.
Hebrews is the New Testament letter written to early Jewish Christians. Its first chapter details that God speaks to us “in these last days” through Jesus.
It lists a number of reasons we should listen to him. He is God’s Son, it says. He is appointed to be heir of literally everything. And, by the way, through him the world was created.
Then it drops this revelation on us:
He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.
Hebrews 1:3
This should cause us to pause.
He is the radiance of God … and also God’s “exact imprint.” What’s more, this radiance and imprint keeps the universe–that he helped make–going by “the word of his power.”
Another letter, Colossians, echoes this concept:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:15-17
God may be invisible to our five senses. But the historical person Jesus of Nazareth is the very image, the “imprint,” of him. And notice all the prepositions: The world was made “by him, “through him” and … “for him.”
That last one is such very good news.
It’s not about me.
If I seek fulfillment in “sex, love, relationships, careers,” it won’t last.
But if I myself was made “by him” and “for him,” well. That changes everything.
Advent comes from the Latin for “coming.” During the days of the four Sundays before Christmas, we are invited to remember the coming of the one by whom, through whom and for whom we were made.
Even now, Jesus holds the universe together by his power. He is still in charge.
I don’t know if you are more Friends or more Seinfeld. If you are chasing relationships and careers, or if you have thrown up your hands to the very possibility of fulfillment.
I do know that Christ makes a claim on you. He made it all, and he made it for himself. That means you have a purpose.
Some people wonder if the Bible is relevant in modern life.
This Christmas, I invite you to pause and consider how the Bible makes life itself relevant.
If it’s not about you … if you are a character in his story … what role are you to play?