Love Story: The Antagonist

A rich life. Pete started life as the youngest of four, born into a strong family where disrespect was not tolerated, and strong marriages were normative for generations. Pete was born into emotional wealth. Doing well in everything was naturally expected, but not in a burdening sort of way – more of a hopeful expectation that he could do whatever he put his mind to, and that, well. He was born into a wealth of confidence. He went through preschool, then onto a highly-ranked suburban elementary school in Overland Park, KS, where he did well in school, won a host of Field Day blue ribbons, and was the captain of the Air Force squadron that patrolled the playground each day – arms fixed like wings, he and the other guys kept everyone safe and sound. There were a few close calls when some sixth graders let a kickball roll into the second grade section. The squadron soared in just in time before a perfectly good game of foursquare was ruined. Pete learned early the value of work. One of the first jobs he remembered was in the third grade. His house sat on a very large lot filled with trees that produced hedge apples. His mother saw an opportunity, and offered a penny for each hedge apple he could gather to be taken away. In his first year, he made over $50 – not bad for the late 1970’s. From that time forward, Pete always had a job going of some sort. He didn’t get an allowance, so if there was something he wanted, he had to make it happen for himself. He was shaped into a wealth of work ethic.

Pete graduated from an upper middle class, nationally ranked high school. He was very busy in school, playing sports, playing trombone, singing, carrying lead roles in the Fall plays and Spring musicals, and working 10-15 hours a week to pay for stuff he couldn’t put off to his Christmas or birthday list. This is an example of the wealth of opportunity Pete enjoyed even in his adolescent years. He did well academically, but not awesome – a 3.5 GPA all the way through. He would also practice his faith all the way through, using his voice to sing at nursing homes to bring a little joy at Christmas, or helping a newly planted refugee from Burma move into an apartment his church provided. He went onto college, keeping his 3.5 alive, and working, and singing, and playing, and getting involved in intramural sports and student body leadership. After getting his B.A., he got married (a week later), and began his Masters degree program outside of Chicago with his new bride. Everything continued as it had – he studied hard enough to keep his 3.5, worked 20 hours or so a week, and enjoyed opportunities to lead when they came. We he got his first full time job, he simply employed his ingrained ethos: work hard, and everything will turn out fine. And it did. Eventually completing his doctorate, Pete had a wealth of education afforded him. Pete thought a lot about God, and he was sure God thought a lot about him, too. Because of his being brought up in church by a devout family, Pete enjoyed a wealth of spirituality as well.

Pete was raised to be polite, but there were some people he secretly struggled to respect. Occasionally, Pete would run across people who were generally poor, and, it appeared to him, were so because of their lack of drive. They didn’t do well in school, they didn’t work much, they made stupid choices that significantly impacted their future, and complained when they didn’t get taken care of by their employer or their government. A lot of them seemed to be hooked on something-or-other, too – another stupid decision. Furthermore, it sure seemed like a disproportionate number of these folk did not share his skin tones, and he wondered if there was a connection there.

Pete did his best to simply live his life as best he could, raising kids in his comfortable home, driving to work in one of his cars, enjoying vacations to cool places, and giving only to charitable causes he was sure wouldn’t result on supporting a habit. Because you can’t trust the poor to be good stewards of money, obviously. Pete was the protagonist of his own story – he was the hero that made his life work well. He avoided those antagonists in life that might get in his way. The poor, as a whole, were antagonists. Pete apparently stocked up a wealth of bias, too.

An Impoverished Life. Clarence was born about the same time as Pete, and was also the youngest of four. He never knew his dad, because his dad left when he was eighteen months old. His dad was not the father of his siblings. He did not offer any child support, and there was no point in going after it, either – if he could be found, he would very likely be unemployed and strung out on drugs. He was born into emotional poverty. Clarence’s mom did the best she could to provide for her kids. She worked two jobs, which meant the kids were home alone most of the time. Clarence did poor-to-average in school. His mom didn’t have the energy to help him with any school work, and it didn’t matter, because she usually got home in time for him to go to bed anyway. The teachers faced the challenge of training children with a severely lacking environment with little-or-no parental support. If a child was failing, there just wasn’t much to be done about it. Clarence found himself impoverished in terms of education.

Clarence enjoyed sports, and spent most of his free time hoopin’ it up with his neighborhood friends. School got tougher and tougher, and he slipped further and further back along with his friends. When he was a junior in high school, he stopped going, and nobody cared. And he certainly wasn’t alone. He wandered a lot during the day, and partied at night, experimenting with various drugs, and learning to enjoy the company of women more and more. He got at least one of the women pregnant, and wanted nothing to do with the child. Clarence learned to make the system work for him, which meant he didn’t have to work to live, but “living” might not quite be the right word. Existing, perhaps. He found himself living with an impoverished work ethic. Realistically, there was very little chance he would ever rise out of what experts call the poverty trap. Virtually nothing in his upbringing or genes pointed toward success. Education was a joke. Opportunities were limited. The looks he got from people from the other side of the tracks didn’t help, either.  Social poverty. Clarence didn’t think much of God, and he was pretty sure God didn’t think much of him.  Spiritual poverty.  Clarence felt like a victim in his own story, a protagonist being defeated by the antagonist’ system which held him in chains.

A Parable? When we read the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16, we need to appreciate the prequel. Characters don’t simply show up as they are. They are created. The Rich Man had attitude about Lazarus that freed him to give him scraps while he put on pounds. Both men in the story were undoubtedly surprised to discover where they landed upon their death. Conventional thought led people to believe that wealth was an indicator of God’s favor, and that poverty, God’s wrath. That Lazarus ended up in a heavenly place while the Rich Man experienced a hellish existence had to absolutely shock the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.

What if we’ve got the characters all mixed up in this world? What if we are not protagonists – heroes of our own story? What if our dreams are limited by the roles we have adopted? Jesus makes it clear that the roles adopted were false, and that there is a real story being played out daily of which we are a part?

Tree/Forest; Antagonist/Protagonist. Very naturally, we adopt the role of protagonist in our personal lives. We are the hero of our own story. Perhaps, however, there is a bigger story. As Donald Miller noted in A Million Miles And A Thousand Years, we are merely trees in a story about a forest. We are not the central character in the grand story. In the story God is weaving as evidenced in the Bible, God is always the protagonist. When Jesus hit the scene, he, like no other before or since, became the visible image of the invisible God – the Protagonist with flesh and blood. Jesus’ goal was to get humanity pointed toward the real story in which we were made to thrive. A life that smelled more like a garden than a garbage dump. More like our images of an Eden-like heaven and less like our thoughts of a burning hell.

Unfortunately, whenever Jesus played his protagonist role boldly, he was experienced as an antagonist. Why? Because he was messing with the story that everybody thought was THE story. He was messing with people’s minds, emotions, behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle, prejudices – everything. When people listened to him long enough, they realized that they weren’t the protagonist as they thought – they were, it turned out, the villain! Some bought into it and began changing the world. But most walked back into their story about the tree, and let the forest fend for itself.

In relation to the far grander story, what role are you playing? What shaping forces formed your opinions about the poor? What concepts do your hold as true that may actually be quite false?

If you are like me, you won’t know the shakiness of the positions you hold until you are exposed to an alternative viewpoint. I wasn’t exposed to alternative data until my senior year in college, when, as part of a team, I discovered that college entrance exams are heavily biased in favor of Caucasians, which meant that non-whites would naturally not score as high as me, and therefore would have a much lower shot at gaining welcome into higher education. You might hear this and say, “Poppycock!” But your disbelief does not change reality. And the apathetic inaction inherent in this reaction results in a perpetuation of the troubled reality, not a solution.

So what can you do?

There are at least two immediate things you can do to align yourselves with God's passion to redeem a world, which must include targeted concern for the poor. First, you can join other CrossWalkers in coughing up an additional $30 for our missions sponsored through the church. When you do just that, you are literally helping people out of the poverty trap where it is strongest: sub-Saharan Africa. Furaha Community Centre is located in Huruma, the second-largest slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. You feed kids and provide education and opportunity with your $30. You also help to insure that abused women and their children in Tijuana don't fall into the trap by supporting Deborah's House, which cares for them, and will soon be offering job training and micro-loans through CrossWalk! Yeah! Your $30 also helps new churches come to life and dead churches come back to life so more people can catch onto Jesus and join us in transforming the world as we ourselves are transformed. Finally, your $30 funds two feeding programs right here in Napa - our Food Pantry, and Project Hope.

Another thing you can do that will help on a global level is join www.ONE.org, a bipartisan group that serves to remind global leaders that how we treat the poor impacts everyone's future, and therefore we must take measures to help dismantle the poverty trap.

But too often think only in terms of money when the subject of poverty is raised. There is such a thing as emotional poverty, ethical poverty, relational poverty, and spiritual poverty, all of which are addressed all the time here at CrossWalk. So, you may be kicking in your $30 for financial poverty, but are you spreading the word about what God can do for someone if they would just give God a shot? You are here at CrossWalk because of what God does in this place. Will you also invite others to join you, so that they might find the same? Or will you find yourself the rich man, enjoying the riches of relationship with God while those around you suffer with no knowledge of what could be different?

The role of Protagonist has been filled. Your role as antagonist is indeed a choice - a choice you can avoid by aligning yourself, your life, your heart, your wallet, your compassion, your dreams, your hopes with God.