The person who left the comment, and I will have to commend him because he actually left his name, said that Katrina hit the Gulf Coast because God wanted it too. Now I am simplifying his argument, and believe me that is hard to do!
I am glad him and I do not share the same God. My God is not a vengeful God that wipes out people because of their sins. My God sent his only begotten Son to redeem this world and show us the path to salvation and not damn us all to hell! My God stretched out his arms on the cross not in hate but in love, love for whom, us the very people the reader thinks should be destroyed.
I am not sure what his religious background is but I think he needs to go back and read his Bible a little more and perhaps seek out some spiritual guidance.
Anyway let us continue to pray for the people literally who will be in the eye of the storm and those called in to help after.
I am following several blogs written by people in the area including the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana. I will try and keep you updated over the next few days.
UPDATE: Fr. Jerry Kramer Blogs from Annunciation Parish in New Orleans, and Episcopal Parish. He is updating as the storm continues. You can follow his blog posts here. And Bishop Charles Jenkins of New Orleans, Episcopal, is also blogging here.
Hear, hear!
Those who would ascribe divine wrath to natural phenomena and the weather (most often exclusively for people other than themselves) need to read Matthew 5:45: God, our Father in heaven, “causes the sun to shine on both the evil and the good, and makes rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.”
Furthermore, their ascription of divine wrath via meteorology is rather selective: they are quick to condemn the likes of New Orleans or San Francisco when they are hit (after all, the “ascribers” don’t commit “those” sins), but strangely silent when tornadoes and floods hit the “Bible-believing, family values” Midwest, for example.
And what of the areas God “misses”? Wall Street, with its greed? Washington DC, with the lying and hypocrisy that underlie so much of its power play? Are we to assume those sins are “all right” in God’s eyes?
Christians must put away such childish thinking. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11). If we are to ascribe punishment of any sort for sin, it must be for our own, rather than pointing fingers at others.
I stand with you, Father Peter: my stakes are on the God who, becoming human in Jesus Christ, was so full of love, he dined with treasonous taxmen and prostitutes, and told the self-righteous and religiously self-assured of his earthly lifetime: “Tax collectors and prostitutes are getting into the before you!” (Matthew 21:31).
Lord, have mercy on everyone and everything in Gustav’s path!
Fr. P.: I thought myself self-righteous, but all that has changed since I find I’m in love, confused and married. It can happen to the lest of you-anyone. We are all sinners deserving His wrath, yet receiving His love instead.