In days to come

    the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains

    and shall be raised above the hills;

all the nations shall stream to it.

    Many peoples shall come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

    to the house of the God of Jacob,

that he may teach us his ways

    and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction

    and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations

    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares

    and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation;

    neither shall they learn war any more.

O house of Jacob,

    come, let us walk

in the light of the Lord!

-Isaiah 2:2-5

 

Like many of you, I have been pondering peace, war, and the place of faith in current events over the last several days, especially since the news on Saturday that the United States had, with Israel, launched attacks at Iran, which in turn launched counter-attacks around the Middle East. I was shocked, concerned, sad, angry, afraid– as so many of us were and still are as the days go on with fresh news each day of the continued violence.

What do we do with news like this? It might feel different to different generations: a few can remember the end of WWII, and some remember the days of the draft and protests of the Vietnam War, others came of age during the tensions of the Cold War, some most clearly recall the Gulf War, and nobody under 25 has ever lived during a time when American troops were not deployed somewhere in a conflict area in the Middle East. Every age has its version of this panic, fear, crisis: 9/11, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, even back to Fort Sumter or the Boston Tea Party.

But it’s not history, at least not in the dry, textbook way. It’s cousins and children and friends and own selves who are enlisted in the armed forces. It’s memories of deployments that might be long past but still present in mind. It’s real people, Americans and Iranians and Israelis and Palestinians and others who are not only affected in their minds but in their whole lives. A 20-year-old from West Des Moines was killed in Kuwait while serving in the Army. A girls school in Iran was bombed; 165 people died, mostly school children. These deaths are horrible. They are pain. I want to look away from all the pain, but every cross I see– in my office, in jewelry, in worship, on the bell tower– reminds me that it was in suffering, pain, and death that Jesus revealed God to us. If I look away from the hungry, the thirsty, the outsider, the sick, the captive, or even the dead, I am looking away from Jesus. Jesus is in “the least of these,” as he declares in Matthew 25:40. 

I don’t pretend to have an easy answer about war and what is justified, especially on an international geopolitical scale. Honestly, I don’t trust anybody whose answers are too quick, too simple, too neat. 

This I do know, though: Christian people have two responsibilities in any time of war. 

First, we have to pay attention. We have to see the pain, to get food to the starving, to get aid to the sick, to provide welcome to the displaced. There are many ways to do this humanitarian aid work, but for Christians it is not just good work: it’s God’s command. 

Second, we must pray and long for peace, like the vision prophesied by Isaiah above. He saw God’s vision of many peoples (to them, that meant different nations who had often been at war with one another) drawn together to walk in God’s paths. Isaiah had seen division, war, and pain. He knew how far away peace seemed. Nevertheless, he trusted and proclaimed God’s vision that there would be days of peace, days when weapons of violence would be turned into garden tools. He believed that peace was God’s goal for all the nations of the Earth.

Let us not lose heart, dear people of God. We shall see Jesus, and we shall long for the day when no one learns war any more, and we shall persevere, for Christ himself has already given us the Kingdom.