Resort to violence as a way of resolving conflict is a habit as old as time. All the religions of the world throughout history have grappled with the questions, proposed answers, and offered remedies. The Judaeo-Christian explanation, told in story form, is that the devil appealed to the pride of the first human beings, who succumbed to the temptation of pride, lost their innocence, and passed a wounded human nature on to the rest of us. The story is told through patriarchal eyes, in the style of the day, and so Adam says Eve made me do it, and Eve in turn says the devil made me do it. Paradise was lost, but God promised to redeem us humans and show the way to paradise restored. It has turned out to be a long journey, one that we are still on, still struggling to make peace in a violent world.

Whatever the explanation of how it first entered into human history, the cycle of violence had begun. When Cain imagined his brother, Abel, to be his enemy and killed him, God forgave Cain, signing him with the mark of his protective love. But, time and again, man ignored that mark of love, continuing to fear, to hate, and to kill.

The escalation, the self-perpetuation of violence, was spelled out in Genesis. Lamech, who killed a man who had struck him, said, "Sevenfold vengeance is taken for Cain, but seventy times sevenfold vengeance will be taken for Lamech." So it has been with generation upon generation. Killing begot killing to this day, until of the victims there is no counting. It is an escalation of violence that Jesus was to say could be stopped only with loving forgiveness. Peter asked him if he had to forgive a brother who had wronged him seven times -- meaning always -- Jesus replied, "No, not seven times but seventy times seven times" -- always and always.

After Cain and Lamech, evil continued until God thought to make a new start with the Flood, saving only a faithful remnant. But God repented of what he had done and placed a new mark on his creation, the rainbow in the sky, a second sign of his protective love and a promise that he would never again destroy the work of his hands. If creation or any part of it is destroyed it will be at our hands, not God's.

In Mark's account of the beginning of the Galilean ministry Jesus proclaims that "the time of fulfillment has come, the kingdom of God is at hand. Change your way of thinking, and believe in the good news." We have heard that call to conversion of heart over the past two millennia. Our ancestors in the Christian faith tried to respond, with mixed success, a times even becoming part of the problem of violence, killing each other in the name of religion. In my Catholic tradition, resort to violence to force conversions and thus extend the faith reached low points in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and in the period of colonial expansion into the New World, where the cross and the sword were planted side by side. On the other hand, high points of nonviolence, of peace and tranquility, were reached in the time and lives of the men and women who offered no resistance to violence, many of whom bore witness to their faith in God by forfeiting their lives.

The 20th Century from which we have just emerged was undoubtedly the most violent of all in the numbers of people killed in World Wars I and II and in the numerous smaller conflicts that plagued the world.

A bright spot in my own church came with the Second Vatican Council, in which our church, prompted by the spirit, reformed itself, turned around, entered a period of genuine ecumenism, apologized for atrocities committed by over-zealous members in the name of the church, and now is holding out the hand of friendship to fellow Christians and to adherents of non-Christian religions as well. Remarkably, John Paul II said recently that the Holy Spirit is operative in all religions of the world, Christian and non-Christian.

The call of Christ is for us to come together, to link arms, to change our stony hearts to hearts of flesh, to work for the justice, peace and joy of the reign of God.

We are challenged in this assembly of the Texas Conference of Churches to reflect on our responsibility to be peacemakers in a violent society, not just to reflect, but to resolve to take steps to promote a culture of life and peace to replace the current culture of violence and death.

I have been asked to reflect this afternoon on global peacemaking in a violent society. Tomorrow afternoon The Reverend Ann Helmke will reflect on local peacemaking in that society. In table discussions after each reflection we will be asked to propose ways in which we might make personal and community contributions to peacemaking.

Our ability to communicate instantaneously now is, you know, rapidly making our world a global village. A consequence of that is that we can no longer say that we cannot help shape policies that affect the global community. Let me address three global issues on which, I believe, we can, individually and as faith communities, have an impact.

Even though the Cold War between the old Soviet Union and the United States has ended, we must not fail to recognize that we are in the nuclear age and always will be. Nuclear power holds the promise of cheap and abundant energy. The recent power shortages in California, which experts say will in time spread throughout the country, have shocked us into the realization that the natural resources in this land of plenty that we once thought were unlimited are in fact finite. They will come to an end. And it is irresponsible for us to say "not in my lifetime." To think that is to brand ourselves as useless stewards of God's creation.

We must confess our grievous sins of wastefulness, our throwaway ways, our habits of exploiting nature's bounty in ways that we have come to realize threaten the livelihood of our children and grandchildren. One example will suffice: We have left a reserve of some 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In the lifetime of many of us, after the discovery of oil, we burned some 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in oil field and petroleum finery flares. How we wish we could have that natural gas back now, but it is gone forever, up in flames, and, ironically, contributing to the depletion of the ozone layer that protects us from the cancer-producing rays of the sun. We say, "Don't mess with mother nature," but we did, and we still do.

The need for energy will increase with our increasing population, and so we must support the development of safe disposition of the radioactive waste from nuclear plants, a technical problem that has not yet been resolved. We must urge our president and our representatives in state and national congresses to face the problem, to switch funds away from the enormously costly development and building of ever more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction to the development of technology to dispose safely of the spent nuclear rods in our nuclear power plants, plants that then would be able to provide for our energy needs without the threat to health that the highly toxic plutonium waste now poses. Even if we begin now it will take years to develop the technology and put it on line.

Further, we cannot safely rely on our finite supply of fossil fuels and natural gas. There are other sources of energy -- solar, wind, grain and thermal -- that must be developed to replace our remaining supply of fossil fuels and natural gas. This energy of the sun and wind is, in human terms, limitless. We have the technological knowhow to harvest that energy without worrying about whether the wind and the sun will forma merger to get a corner on the energy market and drive up the cost. The sun and the wind are given to us free of charge. Using grain to produce more ethanol will help to ease not only the energy crunch but also provide another market for our farmers to sell their crops. In short, wee can and must diversify the ways of producing the energy we need.

At the same time, although the COld War is over, the specter of nuclear annihilation still haunts us, for the United States, Russia, China, England, France and Israel possess enough nuclear bombs to destroy the earth many times over. Renewed talk of developing a Ballistic Missile Defense not only encourages other nations to do the same, re-starting another cold war, but does nothing to protect us from small nuclear bombs in sachel size form. There is a possibility that so-called rogue nations and terrorists will develop or steal or be sold enough nuclear bombs to destroy large population centers, to say nothing of the specter of biological and chemical agents being unloosed upon civilian populations.

As religious people in the Christian tradition, we must stay alert to what is developing among the nations and help shape our country's foreign policy through use of the ballot and contact with our elected representatives in the halls of Congress. Secondly, we must, through the medium of radio, television and the Internet; through correspondence, travel, foreign student exchanges, business enterprises, and such, do our part to bond the human family into one on the planet we share. Resort to violent defense against the threat of violence blinds us to the recognition that we are rooted n a common creation, destined for the kingdom, and united by moral bonds of rights and duties.

In the scriptures, the way of coming together is through forgiveness. When Cain was resentful because God had looked with greater favor on Abel's offering than on his, God said to him, "Why are you so resentful and crestfallen? If you do well, you can hold your head up; but if not, sin is a demon lurking at the door; his urge is toward you, yet you can be the master." But Cain would not forgive, and resorted to violence. Again, when Peter asked Jesus, "How often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times?" Jesus answered, "Not seven, I tell you, but seventy times seven." Jesus was reversing the equation of violence, showing us the way out of the murderous progression that began with Cain. Once we begin to realize our shared human need for compassion and forgiveness, once a sense of accountability for the fate of the earth belongs to each of us, then we shall be already turned around toward one another.

It was Pope Paul VI who cried out in agony: "Let the weapons drop from your hands! You cannot love with weapons in your hands!" It was Oscar Romero who dared to order the soldiers of El Salvador: "Stop the killing! It is your own brothers whom you are killing!"

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, former chief of staff of the Allied forces in World War II, said at war's end, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fires signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children . . . This is not a way of life in any true sense . . . it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron>"

I do not need to belabor the point any further. In this nuclear age as we continue to develop even more sophisticated instruments of destruction, war as a way of settling difference between nations is unthinkable. We must echo the words of Dachau, of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki: "Never again. War never again." We must pray for that. We must work for that. We must hold our elected representatives to that.

When and where will the violence end? In the words of Pax Christi, the international peace organization, words that should be printed indelibly on our hearts: "Violence ends where love begins."

There is a second global issue that requires our attention. It is the widening gap between the developed and undeveloped countries, between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor. Among the peoples of the undeveloped countries, the gap between the well-fed and the starving often reaches the point where the desperately poor are victims of another kind of violence to the human body and spirit, the violence of hunger, starvation, homelessness, landlessness, disease, and lack of medical care. The poor in the undeveloped countries have little or no means of defending themselves against the violence they suffer at the hands of foreign corporations that exploit their cheap labor, land, and natural resources to reap profits for owners and investors in the developed countries.

Repeated calls by religious leaders to the first-world countries to write off some of the debt that continues to crush the third-world nations are at last being heard, our country, thankfully, leading the way by example. But more remains to be done. Those who have money to invest should be careful about the stocks they buy, not looking only about the amount of profit to be gained, but also checking the integrity and ethics of the companies in which they buy stock. Do the companies have a record of picking up and moving, abandoning communities to relocate in places where sweatshops are acceptable, child labor is employed, and workers are paid sub-standard wages? Does the company produce tobacco and alcoholic products, recreational drugs, abortifacients, and other products that are morally unacceptable?

A third global issue that merits our concern in the criminal justice systems operative in the countries of the world. Unfortunately, since we are not serving as a good model for others, it behooves us to push for reform of the criminal justice system in our country, and particularly here in Texas. I will not belabor you with the statistics, but note that they are horrendous. We herd our people into overcrowded prisons understaffed by guards who are underpaid and inadequately trained. We change the name of our systems from the Texas Department of Corrections to the Department of Criminal Justice, largely abandoning programs of rehabilitation and administering justice as a form of retribution. We lead the nation and entire countries in the number of people we have behind bars in medium, maximum, and high security prisons. The medium and maximum security prisons have become Colleges of Crime, in which inmates learn, not how to correct their behavior, but how, after they are released, to escape getting caught the next time they engage in criminal actions. The high security prisons, in which inmates are totally isolated from human contact, are turning them into less than animals. Even animals caged in zoos have contact with each other and with the free world.

Our response to criminal activity in our state is to build more prisons, throw more of our citizens into them, and throw the key away. When we Texans run out of funds to build and staff them we will find ourselves in the same situation as the Californians, who failed to deal with their energy problem before it caught up with them.

Finally, our Texas record on the use of the death penalty is painfully well known. We have more than 400 men and women on death row and are almost on a pace of executing one of them each week. There are no wealthy people on death row. Most are poor and received inadequate defense counsel. Since Texas does not have the possibility of giving a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, a movement is beginning to get underway for our representatives to pass legislation to make that possible, and also to provide that the governor can issue a moratorium on executions until problematic cases can be resolved by adequate defense counsel and DNA testing.

As a Catholic, I reflect ironically that Pope John Paul II, himself a victim of an assassination attempt, not only forgave his attacker, but has stated in his judgment, while supporting the right of the state to impose the death penalty, nevertheless says that he sees no situation in which the death penalty is justified today. Yet, where I come from, I wager that more than 75% of our Catholic people favor the death penalty, and I doubt that it is much different elsewhere in Texas. We Catholics like to pride ourselves on not being a smorgasbord religion, eschewing the picking of what we chose to believe in and live by, but I am afraid that on this issue this is exactly what we are doing.

In the Depression years President Franklin Delano Roosevelt taught us an important lesson: "The only thing we have to fear," he said, "is fear itself." Today we are a nation living in fear of one another, living behind high security walls, locking up everything that is movable, fearful of reaching out a hand of welcome to neighbors.

The United Nations has declared the years 2001 to 2010 an International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World. Is that not where the decision to turn away from violence to peace must begin, with the children? Even before that, with young people entering into marriage and beginning their families? I do not suggest that we of older generations give up on ourselves, but we do need a renewal, a new start, and what better way than to give heed to the message of Jesus: "The time has come. The Reign of God is here. Change your way of thinking and believe in the Good News." That message is directed to each of us. And so I can think of no better way to conclude than with the prayer of Francis of Assisi, who heard the call of Jesus and acted on it:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.