This article is adapted and condensed from Melissa Florer-Bixler’s blog, The Leavings.

This week the United States inserted itself into another war, joining Israel in an unprovoked attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If you are like me, this all feels so big, so impossible to confront, so overwhelming to contemplate.

But we are not the first people to consider what it is like to live as followers of the crucified Jesus in a world thirsty for war. Our collective memory is short, and so we live in a nearly constant cycle of wars that never resolve, that we claim as righteous, that we fight in the name of freedom or security or revenge. In a perverse turn of words, the president of the United States claimed that dropping bombs is an act of peace.

The president is not alone. People of God try to find a way around the command to love our enemies. “You have heard it said,” Jesus tells the skeptical crowd, “love your neighbor but hate your enemy.” That isn’t from the Torah. This phrase is found nowhere in the Old Testament. It is instead one illustration of the ways we have, in every generation, attempted to find a way around the difficult and life-shaping work of peace.

We bless war. We bless violence. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ended his televised remarks by saying, “We give glory to God.” Utter perversity.

In my congregation, the day after the U.S. attacked Iran was Covenant Sunday. Each year, we take time to remember our promises to love one another, to care for this body of the church — this living, breathing assortment of gifts that make up the body of Christ.

In my sermon that morning, I said that each time we share Communion we have a little Covenant Sunday. We come to the table having made a pledge of love to one another. We say: “Will you love and serve our neighbors? Will you support and challenge one another, speak and hear the truth, cease what causes harm to our neighbors and do good to our enemies?”

It is shocking that we agree to shape ourselves around these promises. They are impossible promises. We speak them into the sea of our failures, even as we float them on a raft of hope.

In the Mennonite tradition, we call this impossible promise peace. The form of life that this peace takes is called pacifism. Pacifism is the language we give to the words of Jesus’ first public teaching: Love your enemies. Pacifism is also a word that gets confused and mixed up with other ideologies. It can turn to quietism and retreat and capitulation. Throughout our history as Mennonites, we’ve often seen this mixing up, as our spiritual ancestors removed themselves from the world, attempted to rid themselves of the stain of sin from the world around them.

What we often miss is that peace is not something we are able to secure through our planning or our ingenuity. Mennonite theologian Chris Huebner reminds us that peace is a gift given to us by God. People who commit themselves to churches of peace are likely to discover that our attention to peace gets us into more conflict, not less. The work of peace demands an end to wars, a risky work of prophesying good news to a forgetful world.

In times of war, the way of peace is tested. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the theologian Stanley Hauerwas was asked to write a pacifist response to the horrors that unfolded. It was a tender time of national grief. But revenge roared up from the yawning gap of pain and shock. The only way to make sense of the destruction was to destroy. The only way to make sense of the killing was death. George Bush plunged the United States headfirst into a war. He would go on to perpetrate wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which the United States was responsible for over a million deaths.

Hauerwas talks about this reluctance to pacifism — how, if he wasn’t a Christian, he’d have no interest at all in the idea. “In short,” he wrote, “Christians are not nonviolent because we believe our nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but rather because faithful followers of Christ in a world of war cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent.”

We have lived so close to Jesus, to the Jesus who lays down the power of armies to go into the world and heal, that we cannot imagine anything else. We refuse the myths of this nation, the forgetfulness of generations. Instead, we choose this life: Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.

We don’t wake up one day perfected in the way of nonviolence. Instead, we test and try our experiments in peace in a community of faith. We try out what it means to worship with people who are very different from us, who will hurt us, and we discover how to repent and repair without destroying each other. We listen for the Holy Spirit, in our worship, in each other, in the ways we see others beyond the walls of our church working and willing redemption. We say yes to the possibility of being hurt and to the possibility of being healed.

I can imagine no other life I’d rather celebrate than the one we have carved out here. Peace is a way of life, a gift we receive and then learn through practice. And today is invitation, an invitation in a world of war, to continue to receive the gift of peace again.