What Have We Become?

By Brook McBride | October 10, 2026

Four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

Children are coming home from school. Parents are picking them up. Families are going about the ordinary business of living.

And then the shooting begins.

Seven shots.

A man sitting in his car. A five-year-old child in the back seat. Federal immigration agents surrounding the vehicle—some wearing construction vests, their faces concealed behind masks.

Masks. Again, masks!

The man was wounded. The child was physically unharmed. Federal officials say the driver endangered agents by striking their vehicles. The circumstances remain disputed.

But one question will not leave me alone.

What have we become?

I have watched the news these past few days with a growing sense of disbelief. And anger. And, if I’m willing to admit it, a kind of heartbreak.

How did we get here?

How did we become a country where armed federal agents, their faces hidden, can descend upon a neighborhood filled with families and children—and gunfire becomes part of an ordinary Thursday afternoon?

I understand that there are laws to enforce. I understand that immigration is complicated. I understand that people disagree, sometimes passionately, about our borders and who should be allowed to cross them.

But surely there must be some things that are not complicated.

The dignity of a human being.

The safety of a child.

The responsibility of someone carrying a gun.

The accountability of those who exercise power in our name.

Surely these are not partisan values.

I have spent much of my life as a pastor, preaching a gospel that calls us to love our neighbors. Not just the neighbors who look like us, vote like us, worship like us, or happen to have been born on the same side of a border.

Jesus was rather inconveniently clear about that.

He spoke of welcoming the stranger. Caring for the vulnerable. Loving even our enemies. He told stories in which the outsider was the hero and the religiously respectable were the ones who failed to understand.

And he placed a child in the midst of his disciples and told them that if they wanted to understand the kingdom of God, they ought to start there.

With a child.

I keep coming back to that little boy in the back seat.

Five years old.

What did he see? What did he hear? What will he remember?

I don’t know. But I wonder what it does to a child to experience the world this way. To discover, at five years old, that people with guns can appear without warning and that the person sitting in the front seat can be shot.

There is a song I have loved for years. Kurt Bestor’s Prayer of the Children. It was written in response to the terrible ethnic violence that tore apart the former Yugoslavia.

There is a line I cannot get out of my head:

“Angry guns preach a gospel full of hate.”

A gospel full of hate.

Those words haunt me.

Because I have spent my life trying to preach a different gospel.

A gospel that insists every human life matters. A gospel that asks us to listen before we condemn. To understand before we judge. To recognize something sacred in the face of the stranger.

And I wonder whether we in the church have become so entangled in the politics of power that we have forgotten the very gospel we claim to believe.

Where is our voice?

I know there are Christians speaking out. There are churches offering sanctuary, lawyers defending the vulnerable, and ordinary people placing themselves between frightened families and those who would harm them.

Thank God for them.

But where is the collective moral voice of the church?

When did we become so cautious about offending people that we lost our willingness to disturb them?

I am especially troubled when political power wraps itself in the language of Christian faith while treating compassion as weakness and the foreigner as a threat.

And I am troubled by how easily we excuse violence when it is carried out by those who claim to be protecting us.

I don’t need to know whether the man in that car was a saint.

I don’t need to approve of everything he has ever done.

That’s not the test of human dignity.

The test is whether we believe human dignity belongs to everyone—even those whose lives are complicated, whose choices have been wrong, whose citizenship is disputed, whose stories we do not yet understand.

And the test of our faith is whether we are willing to say so.

I don’t want my anger to become another gospel of hate. That would be easy enough. Anger has a way of doing that.

But neither do I want love to become an excuse for silence.

Love sometimes has to raise its voice.

Love asks hard questions. Love demands accountability. Love refuses to let a child’s fear become just another headline in yesterday’s news.

And love has to have the courage to say: Enough.

Enough of the masks.

Enough of the fear.

Enough of treating human beings as problems to be removed rather than neighbors to be understood.

Enough of hiding behind the language of law and order when the methods themselves deserve serious moral scrutiny.

What have we become?

I keep asking that question.

But perhaps there is another question we need to ask.

What might we yet become?

There is a moment in Luke’s Gospel when Jesus approaches Jerusalem, looks out over the city, and begins to weep.

He sees a city he loves. A city filled with people going about the ordinary business of living. Children playing. Families gathering. People praying. Hoping. Struggling to make their way in the world.

And he weeps.

Not because he has stopped loving them.

But because he has not.

He sees the violence. The fear. The terrible ways people have learned to use power against one another. And he cries out:

“If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” — Luke 19:42

I wonder if Jesus is weeping over us today.

Over our cities. Our neighborhoods. Our frightened children.

Over a nation so divided that we can watch another human being suffer and immediately ask which side he was on.

Over a church that sometimes seems more concerned with protecting its place at the table of power than remembering the carpenter from Nazareth who overturned those tables.

I wonder if Jesus weeps over America.

And I wonder, too, whether we might hear something in those tears.

Not condemnation alone.

But longing.

Longing for us to become something better than this.

A people who recognize the stranger as neighbor. Who understand that justice without mercy can become cruelty. Who refuse to surrender compassion simply because fear has become politically useful.

Perhaps that is where we must begin.

Not with another shout.

But with tears.

Tears that soften what has grown hard within us. Tears that open our eyes to the suffering we have learned not to see. Tears that remind us that behind every headline there is a human face.

But there is something else about that moment outside Jerusalem.

Jesus did not remain on the hillside, weeping from a safe distance.

He continued walking toward the city.

Into its turmoil. Into its injustice. Into its brokenness.

He knew the cost. And still he went.

Perhaps that is the invitation before us now.

Because tears alone are not enough.

We must be willing to enter the brokenness of our own communities. To speak when silence would be easier. To listen when anger tempts us to stop listening. To stand alongside the vulnerable. To demand accountability. To refuse to let cruelty become ordinary.

To work for the things that make for peace.

I still believe we can become something better.

I have to believe that.

And perhaps that is my prayer today.

That we might hear the prayers of the children.

That we might recognize the tears of Jesus.

And that those tears might become a holy disturbance within us—a prophetic call to love more courageously, speak more truthfully, and work more faithfully for a country where every child, every stranger, every human being is treated as someone worthy of love.

God knows, we can do better than this.