Peace is Costly. Very Costly

On July 14 and 15, the Carlisle Barracks in Carlisle, PA (where I live) hosted the 2026 Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit. The summit brought together over 500 organizations, military leaders, and executives from defense, tech, and finance companies. President Trump was the keynote speaker for the event. And according to reports, approximately $10 billion in new investments was announced to support over 4000 jobs in PA. One can only imagine the additional billions of dollars that will eventually exchange hands as a result of the summit in legitimate business deals and financing and contracts.

Humanity has a long history of investing in ways to better kill one another. There’s a lot of money to be made in the craft of killing. There always has been. There is nothing new here. We’re pretty good at it. But there’s always room for more efficient ways to kill apparently.

And let’s not forget, war is profitable – very profitable. “Defense” contractors make a whole lot of money making instruments of death. And there’s a whole industrial complex that extends far and wide that also benefits from it. And let’s be real, the economy does too. There’s plenty of jobs that are created. Communities benefit financially. There’s suppliers. There’s buyers. And investors. And inventors. And whole support networks. War is a big economic reality. And with so much money to be made from it, there is plenty of incentive to have wars and offer support for wars that we aren’t directly involved in.

And in all of this, I’m reminded of a section of this Sunday’s lectionary from 1 Timothy 6:9-10 – “But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”

If we are ever going to actually be serious about peace rather than just talking about it with an emptiness that no one actually believes we care about, we need to recognize that peace will be very costly if we actually attempted to live into it. Very costly. Peace will mean the end of all of it. All the money, the contracts, the jobs, the economic impact, etc. Or at the very least, actually attempting to live by peace will require major changes to how we operate and invest and work.

Which is why I’m not convinced that we will ever actually attempt to live by the way of peace. It’s so much easier to claim to value peace and then disregard the concept without any effort to implement it. Given our current circumstances we have incentivized war. We have made peace a beautiful abstract and a costly reality.

Humanity has a long relationship with violence and war. Humanity also has a long relationship with money. In ancient times, societies even developed gods for these things. I’m not convinced we ever actually gave up those gods. We just stopped naming them as gods. But we still listen to them. We make our decisions based on them. We have values based on them. We order our lives and civilizations around them. If that’s not a god, I don’t know what is. If we were honest, we’d return to calling them gods. But I won’t hold my breath for that either. We seem to be in a time in which honesty isn’t in vogue. Then again, I’m not sure humanity has ever had a good relationship with honesty. Humans didn’t like prophets primarily because the prophets named reality and the people preferred the lie they told themselves.

A colleague sent me a video of an interview Bono (the U2 lead singer) did with Eugene Peterson (who translated the Bible into The Message). You can watch it here. It’s a fascinating conversation between two men of deep faith. One of the conversation points that struck me was Bono talking about how he distrusts Christians because they are often not dealing with reality. The world is a violent place he said. And scripture captures that violence as real. And offers a way to deal with it.

I think good news is good because it deals with reality. I once heard a colleague say that hope deals with reality. Not sugar coating it. And then offers a way forward that reminds us that God is moving us along a different path. I think good news is like that.

It reminds me of what Martin Luther said about the theology of the cross in the Heidelberg Disputation from 1518. He wrote: “A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.”

So much of what passes for Christianity these days is actually just the theology of glory. It either ignores the evil or sugar coats it or just willfully twists it so that it is not recognizable. Let me be clear about that because what I just wrote can easily be twisted as well. I’m not talking about the culture wars and individual moral rules that a society has determined as the norm. I’m talking about reality that we willfully turn our heads away from.

The reality of homelessness in the world’s richest nation in history. The reality of an epidemic of loneliness in a world that is more technologically connected than ever. The reality of human trafficking. The reality of domestic violence. The reality of xenophobia that has plagued this country since before it was a country. The reality of racism, and misogyny, and homophobia. The reality of poverty. The reality of gun violence. The reality of preferred ignorance. The reality of pollution and environmental destruction. The reality of greed. The reality of an addiction to certainty and imposing beliefs on others. That’s not even scratching the surface of the reality we inhabit. But instead of looking at reality and dealing with it, we seem more concerned with laying blame, finger pointing, forcing compliance, believing we can twist reality the way we want, living in a fantasy world, and more.

You want the world to be a better place? Start by looking at reality and see it for what it is. It’s the starting point. Then receive hope that the reality doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It’s not set in stone. It will only remain as it is so long as we pretend it isn’t there and keep holding onto our fantasy world as if it were real. It’s not.

Peace is costly. Very costly. And the cost is more than just economic. The cost is letting go of how the world operates and our false sense of control over ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Peace isn’t the absence of conflict. Peace is the world and all in it being in right relationship with one another. And when that’s the case, there is no need to impose. There is no need to profit off of violence and war. There is no need to see us and them. There is no need. There is just peace. It’s not a fantasy. It’s not that the world will be perfect. It’s that we’ll see it as it is and actually deal with it. It’s the cost. The cost of leaving the way we do things behind. The cost of recognizing that our assumptions about normal are anything but normal. The cost of embracing a world that we don’t know how to live in, but are willing to learn.