United Methodist Church Westlake Village

The Unnamed Antagonists

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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The unnamed antagonists in our lives—systemic forces like poverty, racism, corruption, and trauma—shape our stories in ways we often fail to recognize. Drawing from personal experiences fostering rescue dogs, teaching high school students, and insights from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, this message explores how these invisible forces impact those Jesus calls us to serve.

Guest Preacher Ryan Blanck introduces us to Polly, a rescue dog whose fear of men revealed a history of abuse without speaking a word. Consider Fantine, whose desperate measures to support her daughter weren't moral failings but responses to a system designed to crush her. And there's Jay, a struggling student whose test scores tell almost nothing about the real challenges he faces daily. These stories challenge our comfortable assumptions that success comes simply through hard work and determination.

When Jesus speaks about the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned in Matthew 25, he's not just calling us to occasional charity but to genuine solidarity with those facing these unnamed antagonists. This means recognizing systemic injustice, humanizing those affected by speaking their names, and being present even when we can't solve every problem. Sometimes, like with a fearful rescue dog, the most important thing we can do is simply sit on the floor, create a safe space, and let trust develop gradually. As followers of Jesus, we're called to see beyond categories and statistics to the beloved individuals made in God's image. Have you taken time to learn the names and stories of those society would rather keep nameless?

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Ryan Blanck:

It's wonderful to be with you all again. I was here about a year ago, just after Easter last year, and got to share in worship with you then and back again, and it's truly a pleasure to be here today. So I want to start by telling you about a dog. Her name was Polly and she was our guest for the weekend. So over the span of about four years or so my family and I provided foster care for a local animal shelter here in the area and every Sunday afternoon after church we would pick up a dog and sometimes two or three, depending on the need and take care of them for a couple days while the shelter was closed for their sort of weekend on Monday and Tuesday, and then bring them back to the shelter on Wednesday, hoping that they would get their forever home very soon. So Polly was one of about 150 dogs who stayed with us over that period of time Not all at once, but over the course of several years and she stands out for a couple reasons in my memory. First, she was just kind of a funny-looking mixed-breed dog. First she was just kind of a funny-looking mixed-breed dog, just unusual in appearance. But more importantly and more apparently she had a rough life before being rescued. Many of these foster dogs that we welcomed into our home were shy or standoffish, especially around me, as being the only adult male in the house. Many of them didn't like me for that, but this was much more pronounced in Polly's case. She was downright afraid of me and even though we didn't know what had happened in Polly's past, there was obviously a pair of unnamed antagonists in her story neglect and abuse. I don't even want to imagine what Polly had been through, but her behavior made it clear that something had happened. She avoided me and would seek comfort with my wife or daughters whenever I was in the room.

Ryan Blanck:

Now my day job is as an English teacher and I tend to often see life as stories filled with protagonists and antagonists, and today I want to talk about some of those unnamed antagonists. We see several of them rear their ugly heads in our gospel reading from Matthew 25. In these verses, jesus speaks of those who are hungry and thirsty, those who are naked or sick, those who are lonely or in prison. We know what these people look like and can probably empathize with their situation, but how often do we stop and consider how they got to be in that state. Why are they hungry or thirsty or naked or sick, lonely or in prison? It could be the results of their own actions or poor decisions. They could have brought this on themselves, but we also need to consider the unnamed antagonists, things like systemic poverty, xenophobia, corruption, to name a few.

Ryan Blanck:

One of the kind of sucky things that I've learned about being an adult and learned about life is that you can do everything right. You can play by the rules and still get screwed over in the end. You can have a good paying job. You can make wise financial decisions. What happens when the financial system that you trusted with your retirement makes some very poor or maybe even illegal decisions and you lose everything? I'm reminded of the housing market crash back in 08 and the great recession that followed. At the time, I was doing okay, we were getting by, but I saw that the generation ahead of me, the boomers of my parents' generation, watched their life savings literally disappear overnight, and then I saw the millennials coming up behind me, graduating college and such, with all kinds of student loans and debt, getting screwed out of their dream jobs that simply vanished. The cause of both of these was the same unnamed antagonist systemic greed and corruption, a system that saw an opportunity to get rich quick regardless of the real-world consequences for real people.

Ryan Blanck:

Recently I finished reading a book by Dr Jamar Tisby called the Color of Compromise, in which he documents the white American church's complicity in systemic racism over the last four centuries. What made this book especially difficult to read was the fact that it wasn't just about those people over there in the distant past doing some horrible things to black people in this country, but he tells the story of my history and my traditions as a follower of Jesus, and it's not just a long history of individual racist persons, but a centuries-old system, an unnamed antagonist of racism, that has taken the lives and livelihoods of countless black Americans. One moment in that book that I most remember is at the very beginning, in the introduction he talks about. Dr Tisby talks about visiting a colonial museum in Virginia, and one display he talks about was the text of a commonwealth law from the colonial era that I don't know what to do with that. The unnamed antagonists of unfettered greed and systemic racism somehow convinced these white men of colonial government that this was a right and just law.

Ryan Blanck:

Now I know many of you are reading Matt Rawls' commentary on Les Mis and hopefully you all are enjoying that. I was appreciative of Pastor Darren giving me a copy and allowing me to read that as well. And in chapter 3, rawls draws our attention to perhaps one of the most influential characters in the entire novel and musical. Not Jean Valjean or Javert, and not even the bishop who forgives Valjean's crimes. Rawls names the unnamed antagonist of this epic novel poverty. And nowhere do we see this more pronounced than the story of Fantine.

Ryan Blanck:

In Hugo's novels we get much more of Fantine's backstory than in the musical. Hugo lets us see her life before she falls into poverty, and I think this only heightens the tragedy of her story. But in the musical we first meet Fantine when she's already working in Valjean's factory, trying desperately to support her daughter Cosette. Like many tragic literary characters and even real-life individuals, fantine is the embodiment of the saying no good deed goes unpunished. Fantine is trying to do everything right. She trusts Thénardier and his wife to care for Cosette, because she knows she cannot care for Cosette herself. Unfortunately, the Thénardiers are scoundrels who keep Fantine in poverty by extorting money from her. Fantine's also a model employee until it's found out that she's an unwed mother, which results in her being dismissed from her job. Putting her own well-being and happiness aside, she goes to desperate measures to pay for her daughter's care. She first sells her hair and even her teeth, and then finally her own body in prostitution. This is all summed up in the final verse of Fantine's song. I Dreamed a Dream which we'll be hearing later. I had a dream. My life would be something different from this hell I'm living, so different now than what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dream.

Ryan Blanck:

Fantine's story can best be summed up in the familiar words from the Robert Burns poem the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. In that poem, burns laments the fact that all this mouse's hard work in creating its home comes to nothing when the farmer plows through the field. This reality goes against many of the ideals that we're taught to hold on to. We're taught that all you need is a dream and a good work ethic to be successful. We're led to believe that when a person falls into poverty it's due to some moral failing or perhaps their own laziness. We've been taught to conflate material success with moral virtue and personal piety. But I think Fantine's story arc illustrates some of the fallacies in that thinking. She's truly a victim of a system that punishes poverty regardless of personal virtue or determination. And, more importantly, she gives a face and a name to the poor, much like these unnamed antagonists of poverty or racism or corruption. Much like these unnamed antagonists of poverty or racism or corruption.

Ryan Blanck:

Too often we depersonify groups of people into abstraction no-transcript. It's easier and less uncomfortable to keep them nameless in their arm's length, but Fantine insists that we resist that urge. Fantine insists that we know her name. Let me give you another example from my 9-to-5 job. As I said, I'm a high school English teacher and if I had a dollar for every time I heard the term achievement gap, I probably could have retired four or five years ago.

Ryan Blanck:

If you're unfamiliar with the term, it's pretty self-explanatory, but it refers to the gap in various achievement markers between the so-called high-achieving students and the low-achieving students, and this is usually measured through things like a student's GPA, standardized test scores, access to honors or advanced classes, college acceptance rates and things like that. But not surprisingly, those on either side of this achievement gap are also separated by other markers like race, ethnicity, socioeconomics and even geography. The high-achieving students tend to be from middle and upper-class white families who live in good neighborhoods. The high-achieving students tend to be from middle and upper-class white families who live in good neighborhoods, while low-achieving students tend to come from lower and middle-class black and brown families who live in bad neighborhoods. But we in education have very little control over these outside factors. We can only control what goes on in the classroom even then, not even that. So we have meetings and workshops and we collaborate with our colleagues to develop these instructional strategies to help close that gap in test scores and GPA and things like that, and it doesn't take an overpaid educational consultant to tell you that there's only so much that these strategies can do to bring about real change and actually close that achievement gap.

Ryan Blanck:

One thing that's often overlooked is that there are too many outside factors that are not accounted for in all that data. A student's score on a standardized test can be affected by so many things that the student's actual reading other than sorry, that student's actual reading ability or math skills. The student may have gotten into a fight with their boyfriend or girlfriend the night before. They may not have had a nutritious breakfast before school. They may have been up all night or up late the night before babysitting a younger sibling while their parents work late, or the student might just be a really bad test taker. The point is that the data doesn't tell the entire story. There are far too many unnamed antagonists. Another problem is that we often lose sight of the individual students who might be struggling. We see all the numbers and percentages and color-coded graphs and charts, but we don't see the fantines, so to speak. The names and faces of those individual students get lost in the data.

Ryan Blanck:

I want to tell you about one of those students. I'll refer to him as Jay. Jay is a freshman in one of my English classes. His test scores said that he is reading below grade level and was placed in our school's reading intervention program. And while it may be true that his reading is below grade level, there's so much more to Jay than those test scores point out. They don't show the fact that he's just a stereotypical 14-year-old boy with ADHD and processing difficulties. They don't say anything about him being a growing young man, full of energy and hormones and literally always hungry, always asking for snacks or asking friends for an apple or granola bar or something. And they don't show the emotional trauma that he's experienced at home or the accompanying anxiety and depression that he deals with on a daily basis. But it would be so easy, based on test scores and missing assignments and classroom behavior, just to write him off as one of those kids. But that doesn't take into account the unnamed antagonists in Jay's life. Like Fantine, jay is in many ways at the mercy of unnamed antagonists of trauma, learning disabilities and anxiety.

Ryan Blanck:

So what do we do as Jesus followers here in the Coneo Valley in 2025? What do we do with all this? First, I think we need to make an effort to recognize the name. Recognize and name the unnamed antagonists in our own story and in the stories of those we encounter. We need to recognize that, like Fantine or Polly, the foster dog, or Jay, sometimes, those we encounter are no match for the antagonists they face, whether it's poverty, racism, corruption and greed, physical and emotional trauma. Second, we need to become more comfortable speaking the names of those in the clutches of these unnamed antagonists.

Ryan Blanck:

In our gospel reading, jesus speaks of the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the naked and the imprisoned. But we need to turn that around. And it's not just a neglected and abused rescue dog. It's Polly. It's not just an unwed mother working the assembly line. It's Fantine. It's not just a freshman boy with low reading scores it's Jay. It's much more difficult to dehumanize someone when we know and speak their name, when we see them through the eyes of God. But simply knowing their names is not always enough. If we're to live into the words of Jesus and feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the imprisoned, then we need to spend time with them. We need to build relationships with them. In another book I recently read, called the Anti-Greed Gospel, dr Malcolm Foley says that Jesus is not calling us merely to community service or to mere generosity, but into solidarity with those who are on the margins. We're to follow the example of Jesus himself, who entered into solidarity with us when he clothed himself in human flesh. We see the early church living this out in the book of Acts with this repeated phrase they had everything in common and no one was in need.

Ryan Blanck:

Going back to Polly as we close things up, when Polly was staying at our house, like I said, she wanted nothing to do with me.

Ryan Blanck:

She often cowered in the corner or hid behind someone else when I entered the room and it kind of drove me crazy. I love dogs and having one stand off like that just kind of drove me crazy. So I was determined to get her to like me somehow, or at least tolerate my presence in the room, so that first night she was with us, I just sat on the living room floor while we watched TV, just sat and waited, doing my best to ignore her, and slowly but surely she kind of inched her way over until I could reach over and give her a nice little gentle pat on the head. And I think that's what Jesus is asking us to do here. We don't need to, and sometimes we simply can't swoop in and solve the other person's problems, but we can sit with them, we can be a non-anxious presence in their midst. That shines the love of Jesus, because as Victor Hugo said, and it's said over there, to love another person is to see the face of God.

Pastor Darren:

Amen, I appreciate Ryan here. I thought I would take just a half a minute to set up our solo for today. I dreamed a dream. You'll remember that Fantine was somebody who had made some choices early on, romantically together with a man, getting pregnant with her and then his family not letting him be with her. But she's got that resolve, she's got that commitment to get it done and slowly life weighs heavier and heavier to the point that she's sitting there living a life in prostitution, having lost her hair, having lost her teeth. This song is the moment of her coming to that heavy and horrible realization that life isn't going to allow for that. For that dream, for her.

Tracy Van Fleet:

There was a time when men were kind, when their voices were soft and their words inviting, and there was a time when love was blind and the world was a song and the song was exciting. And there was a time when it all went wrong. I dreamed a dream in days gone by, when hope was high and life worth living. I dreamed that love would never die. I dreamed that God would be forgiving. Then I was young and unafraid and dreams were made and used and wasted. There was no ransom to be paid, no song unsung, no wine untasted. But the timeides come at night, with their voices soft as thunder, as they tear your hope apart, as they turn your dream to shame. He slept a summer by my side. He filled my days with endless wonder, he took my childhood in his stride, but he was gone when autumn came. And still I dreamed he'd come to me, that we would live the years together. We would live the years together. But there are dreams that cannot be, and there are storms we cannot weather.

Tracy Van Fleet:

I had a dream. I had a dream. My life would be so different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed. Thank you,