Work Text:
The hymn had barely faded when Pastor Edwin Cole stepped up to the pulpit, Bible in one hand, folded sheaf of notes in the other.
First Baptist of McAllen was full, as always. Oil money and citrus money mingled in the pews; ranchers, insurance men, small business owners. A few young couples with toddlers squirming between them. The usual smattering of Air Force uniforms from the base just outside town.
He had preached a hundred sermons on the family, on personal responsibility, on sin and redemption.
Today, a different verse burned a hole in his notes.
“Brothers and sisters…
I want to talk to you this morning about something that has been heavy on my heart. Heavier than I know how to say. I have rewritten this message, I don’t know how many times. I have prayed until the words blurred and my knees hurt.
And I want you to know right at the start: I am not preaching at you today. I am preaching to us. To myself. To this whole church. To anyone who loves this country and loves the Lord and is trying to understand what faithfulness looks like when the world feels like it’s tilting toward war.
Now… before you stiffen up on me, before anybody crosses their arms and thinks, “Oh no, the preacher’s turned political,” I want you to hear me clearly.
This is not a message about parties. This is not a message for the troops, for civilains. This is not a message about whether you voted for President Robeson or not. I am not running for office and I have no interest in starting today.
This is a message about the cross.
About the kingdom of God.
And about what it really means when we say we are pro-life people, Bible people, Jesus people, who also live in a nation that is talking, very loudly, about sending our sons and daughters into war for the first time in forty-five years.
So if you’ll bear with me, open your Bibles to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5. We’ll begin with the words of Jesus, because if we get those wrong, nothing else we say today will stand.
Matthew 5, verse 9: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
Let me read that again, slowly.
“Blessed are the peacemakers… for they shall be called the children of God.”
Not, “Blessed are the comfortable.” Not, “Blessed are those who win debates.” Not, “Blessed are those who shout the loudest on the radio.”
Peacemakers.
People who make peace. People who work for it. Sacrifice for it. Wrestle with it.
Now, I know some of you are already thinking, “Pastor, that’s all well and good, but we live in the real world. There are bad people out there. Dictators. Armies. Threats. Don’t we have to stand up to them?”
Yes. We do. I am not a naïve man. Evil is real. Sin is real. There are regimes in this world that crush the weak and trample the poor. The Bible does not call us to close our eyes and hum hymns while the wolves devour the sheep.
But hear me: being a peacemaker is not the same as being passive.
A peacemaker is someone who looks at all the options God has put on the table—prayer, diplomacy, pressure, sacrifice, even suffering—and says, “If there is any way, Lord, any way at all, to avoid bloodshed and still restrain evil, I will choose that road first.”
The question before us, church, is not: “Does evil exist?” Of course it does. The question is: How quickly, how easily, how casually are we willing to reach for war as our solution?
We need to talk about that.
Because for forty-five years, this nation of ours has not fought a full-scale war. Some of you here remember the last one. Some of you were children during World War II. Some of you had fathers, brothers, uncles who never made it home.
If you walk back far enough into your memories, you remember radio bulletins and newspaper headlines and star flags in windows. You remember standing in lines with ration books. You remember your mama crying over a telegram.
And when that war ended, the world said, “Never again lightly. Never again without counting the cost.”
Our country, this United States of America that I love, came out of that war saying, “We will build. We will trade. We will lead. We will be strong. But we will not treat war as just another tool in the toolbox.”
And for nearly half a century, we have kept that.
We have had tense moments. We have had crises. We have faced down communists and despots and uprisings. We have sat across tables from men we did not trust. But we have not sent our sons and daughters into battle since 1945.
Brothers and sisters, that is not just an interesting fact. That is a gift.
It is a mercy.
All these years without a war is a mercy of God.
And now—right now, in these months, in these speeches we hear on the television, in the headlines from Washington—the seal is cracking. The talk has turned to “limited objectives” and “all necessary means” and “coalition action.”
Some of you have children in uniform. Some of you have grandchildren in the reserves. Some of you have neighbors and cousins and friends who wear that flag on their shoulder and say, “If my country calls, I will go.”
And I respect that. I honor that.
But the question I cannot escape is this: What does it mean to be a Christian—specifically, a conservative Christian, a pro-life Christian—when the nation is considering war for the first time in two generations?
You see, we have been very bold, very loud, about being pro-life.
We have marched. We have held signs. We have prayed outside clinics. We have voted for candidates who promised to protect the unborn. We have preached—and I have preached—that every child in the womb is known by God, loved by God, and deserves to live.
I still believe that with all my heart. I will not back down from that for one second.
But now, my brothers and sisters, if we say that life is sacred in the womb, we must also decide what we believe about life at nineteen.
About life in a uniform.
About life in the middle of a desert, half a world away.
We cannot be pro-life for the unborn and careless about the young men and women we are sending into harm’s way.
We cannot say that every unborn child is too precious to lose, and then turn around and talk about “acceptable casualties” when those children grow up, put on boots, and board a plane.
Do you hear what I’m saying?
I am not saying a nation may never fight. The Bible does not teach that. There is a time to defend the weak. There is a time to stand in the gap. There is a time when, despite everything, war may be the last resort in a fallen world.
But church, last resort means last resort. It means every other option has been tried with tears and fasting and pleading and patience. It means we have looked at the bottom of the barrel and found nothing left but the sword.
Last resort cannot mean “the option that polls well this month.”
It cannot mean “the choice that makes us feel strong again.”
It cannot mean “the fastest way to remind the world who we are.”
When the government of this nation—any party, any president—comes to us and says, “We need to break forty-five years of peace and go to war,” they are asking for something much bigger than a bump in approval ratings.
They are asking us to hand over our sons and daughters.
They are asking us to carry the weight of blood on our national conscience.
And friends, that is holy ground.
Now, some will say, “Pastor, you’re stepping out of bounds. The Bible doesn’t talk about Gulf politics. This is for generals and presidents, not preachers.”
Let me answer gently but firmly:
The Bible does talk about the value of human life.
The Bible does talk about justice and mercy.
The Bible does talk about kings and nations and the way God judges them when they shed innocent blood or trust in horses and chariots more than in Him.
And the Bible says in Proverbs 24:11–12: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?”
We know what war is. We may not know all the details of this conflict in the Gulf, what is said in closed rooms in Washington and Moscow, but we know what war is.
It is death.
It is broken bodies.
It is shattered minds.
It is widows and orphans and empty chairs at Thanksgiving tables.
It is fathers who never come home and mothers who never stop waking up at 3 a.m. hearing their child’s last words in their dreams.
And we cannot say to God, “We did not know.”
We know.
So when we as a church see our nation flirting with war for the first time in nearly half a century, we have a responsibility. Not to dictate policy. Not to appoint ourselves Secretary of State. But to hold the Word of God up like a mirror and ask hard questions.
Let me say something else that may be uncomfortable.
We, as conservative Christians, have often wrapped our faith around our politics so tightly that I’m not sure we know where one ends and the other begins.
We have been faithful and loyal to certain parties, certain leaders, certain slogans. We have said, “These folks are on our side.” And many times, on many issues, they have been.
But my friends, our allegiance to any party stops where our allegiance to Jesus Christ begins.
If the day comes—and I believe it has come—when the people we usually vote for are leading us toward a war that our conscience, formed by Scripture and prayer, tells us is too quick, too casual, too unexamined… then we must say, in love but in firmness: “We cannot follow you there.”
That does not mean we hate our country.
It does not mean we despise our soldiers.
It does not mean we want dictators to triumph.
It means we take seriously the words “Thou shalt not kill.”
It means we believe that breaking forty-five years without war is not a small thing.
It means we believe that peacemaking is part of our calling as the children of God.
I know some of you have already faced this tension. I have heard it in your voices this past month.
A young man in our congregation came to me with deployment papers in his hand. His voice shook as he asked me to pray over him. He said, “Pastor, I don’t even know if I understand this war, but I swore an oath.”
I put my hands on his shoulders and I prayed for his protection. I prayed that God would surround him with mercy. I prayed that he would come home.
And then, after he left, I went into my office, and I wept.
Because I realized: here we stand at a crossroads, church. We have the chance, right now, before the first shot is fired, to ask: “Are we sure? Are we absolutely sure that this is necessary?”
Not “Does it sound strong?”
Not “Will other nations respect us more?”
Not “Does it line up with our team’s talking points?”
But: “Does this war meet the standard of last resort before a holy God who loves every person wearing every uniform on every side?”
Do you realize that? God does not only love American soldiers.
He loves Iraqi conscripts who were dragged into their army.
He loves Soviet pilots sitting in cockpits, wondering what they are about to do.
He loves Kuwaiti families hiding in basements, terrified.
He loves every single life that will be touched by this war.
We cannot see them all. But He can.
And if we put that on the scales, if we ask ourselves, “Have we truly tried everything else?”—what answer do we give?
Have we wept in prayer as seriously as we have shouted on talk radio?
Have we written letters demanding diplomacy with half the passion of the letters demanding force?
Have we urged our leaders to sit, and talk, and seek creative solutions, or have we only cheered when they promised “resolve”?
I’m not telling you what policy to write. I am not qualified. But I am called to ask these questions.
Because if, down the line, this war goes badly—if it drags on, if it spreads, if it scars this nation in ways we can’t yet see—no one is going to come to the churches and say, “Why didn’t you preach?”
They will simply live in the aftermath.
And we will answer to God for whether we spoke or stayed silent.
Church, in the last weeks, I have heard some Christians talk like this:
“Well, if we go to war, that’s God’s will. If we go to war, God is on our side. If we go to war, it must be righteous.”
No. No. History is full of nations who went to war praising their gods, quoting their scriptures, convinced that heaven marched with them. That did not make them right.
Our God is not a tribal mascot.
He does not wear anyone’s uniform.
He does not sit in the Situation Room nodding at our plans like an adviser.
Our God is the One who says in Psalm 46, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
He is the One who says in Micah 6:8, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Humbly.
War is not a humble thing. It may sometimes be necessary, but it is never humble.
So if we are to support it, we had better carry that decision with trembling, not triumph. With tears, not cheering.
I know—believe me, I know—that some of you are uncomfortable right now.
You might be thinking, “Pastor, this sounds like you’ve gone liberal.”
I smile when I hear that, because I have spent my whole life being called a conservative. I believe the Bible is the Word of God. I believe in the authority of Scripture. I believe in the sanctity of life, the importance of the family, the need for personal responsibility.
But to me, those convictions lead to this moment and this message.
Because if we say God is the author of life, then I must weigh very heavily the decision to support something that will end many lives.
If we say the family is sacred, then I must think very hard before I bless policies that will leave chairs empty at family tables.
If we say government is limited—that it cannot fix everything, that it is prone to error—then I must be cautious about trusting it with the biggest project of all: war.
Being conservative does not mean cheering every use of force.
It means being slow to change the deepest patterns of our national life.
And there is no deeper pattern than this: We have lived in peace for forty-five years.
To break that… requires heavy, heavy justification.
The last thing I want to say is this: whatever happens in Washington, whatever votes are cast, whatever speeches are made… we, as a church, must decide who we will be.
If this war comes, and some of our own sons and daughters go, we will love them. We will pray for them. We will send them letters and packages and we will welcome them home with tears and open arms.
We will not shame them for going. We will not turn our backs on them because we had doubts about the policy.
We can hold two truths at once: “We love you” and “We wish this had never been necessary.”
And if this war comes, and we see images on the television that make our stomachs twist—bombs falling, cities burning, soldiers crying—we must remember that the people under those bombs are not abstractions. They are souls.
We must pray for our enemies. We must ask God to restrain cruelty. We must ask Him to bring this, whatever “this” becomes, to an end as quickly as possible.
We must not let our hearts grow hard just because a commentator tells us that empathy is weakness.
I will tell you what weakness is.
Weakness is letting fear do your thinking.
Weakness is letting anger write your prayers.
Weakness is loving your country more than you love your God.
But strength—true strength—is standing in a moment like this and saying,
“Lord, we want justice, but we also want mercy.
We want safety, but we do not want to grow cruel.
We want to protect the innocent, but we do not want to become guilty ourselves.”
I do not know how the next months will unfold. I do not know what decisions our leaders will make. I do not know what headlines we will wake up to.
What I do know is this:
You and I will stand before God one day, not as Republicans or Democrats, not as hawks or doves, but as His children.
And He will ask us not, “Did you always back your team?” But, “Did you seek my heart? Did you love your neighbor? Did you remember the value of the least of these? Did you hunger and thirst for righteousness? Did you try—honestly try—to be a peacemaker?”
Brothers and sisters… today I’m asking you to join me in that humbling work.
To pray for our leaders—not just that they would be “strong,” but that they would be wise.
To pray for our soldiers—not just that they would be victorious, but that they would be preserved from soul-wounds no medal can heal.
To pray for our enemies—not that they would be annihilated, but that hearts would change, that tyrants would fall without the innocent falling with them.
And to pray for your pastor, because I am just a man, and I am scared sometimes that I will say too much or too little, lean too far into comfort or too far into controversy.
But I would rather, in this moment, risk your displeasure than God’s silence.
If you leave here today angry with me, but driven to your knees to search the Scriptures and ask, “Lord, what do You say about war, about life, about peace?”—then I will count that as grace.
If you leave here today unsure what you think, but a little less sure that war is a simple thing—that, too, is grace.
And if you leave here today resolving that whatever happens, you will be a person who remembers the cost of every decision made far away in marble halls—that is grace upon grace.
Let us be, in this time, what Jesus called us to be:
Salt, that keeps the world from rotting.
Light, that keeps the darkness from winning.
Peacemakers, who will be called the children of God.
Would you bow your heads with me?
Let us pray.”