New beginnings

"Tonight you can be assured of two things," the Rev. Terry Pannell told an interfaith service for Muslim, Jewish and Christian hurricane evacuees being sheltered at St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Monroe, Louisiana, on August 31. "The first is that God is where God is needed most. God is with you tonight. And the second thing is that God does not forget. The waters will recede."

"Because God remembers, new beginnings are possible," he said. "What Noah understood and what displaced people throughout history have experienced is that the inner strength needed to overcome tragedy is found in the bond we have with God."

The Rev. Patricia Templeton, rector of St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church in Atlanta, said on September 4 that the questions of where God was and why God allows such suffering to occur are questions "to which there is no answer that is fully satisfying."

However, she told her congregation, there are answers that she knows are wrong. Katrina was not punishment for sin or part of a "greater and good purpose ... that we cannot understand," she said.

"To suggest that God intentionally caused this tragedy for any reason is obscene and nothing less than blasphemy," she said. "God is indeed involved in the sufferings of this Earth -- not by causing them, but by being deeply affected by them."

At St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Cypress, Texas, on September 4, the congregation heard the Rev. Jeff W. Fisher quote French theologian Paul Claudel: "Jesus did not come to explain away suffering or remove it. He came to fill it with his presence." Fisher said Christians "have the sad opportunity to fill this tragedy with the presence of Jesus' love."

Bringing transformation

The Rev. Ellen Ekstrom, deacon at St. Mark's in Berkeley, California, told her congregation on the same Sunday that "God was with the people climbing up on rooftops to outrun the flood waters, God was with the rescuers, God is with the dying and the evacuees pouring into Texas" and with those who grieve their losses.

Templeton told her congregation in Atlanta that God's presence brings transformation. "And I must believe that although God may not be all powerful in ways that prevent hurricanes and floods," she said. "God does have the kind of power that brings grace and redemption to even their horrors, and give us the strength to continue and to rebuild and to make all things new."

One of the first to preach on Katrina was the Rev. Wilifred Allen-Faiella, rector of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove, in the Diocese of Southeast Florida. Hurricane Katrina made its first landfall, as a Category 1 storm, near Coconut Grove on the evening of Thursday, August 25. The following Sunday Allen-Faiella centered her sermon on Jesus' invitation in that morning's gospel to "take up their cross and follow me."

"Jesus doesn't say 'go look for a cross to pick up and carry.' The existence of crosses in each of our lives is a given," she told the congregation. However, she said, our impulse is to deny the existence of hardship, pain, sorrow, suffering, illness and death.

"But trying to hide it or deny it or run from it does deprive us of experiencing the resurrection, the transformation that always comes when we do take up our crosses," Allen-Faiella preached.

The next Sunday, she told her congregation that Katrina was "apocalyptic" in that the Greek roots of the word point to uncovering, revealing, unveiling. "An apocalypse of this magnitude breaks open and lays bare the status quo. It makes a statement: this is who we are. But it also asks a question: is this who we want to be?" she said.

She began to answer the question this way: "We Christians, and I mean all Christians -- right wing, left wing, and everyone in the vast middle -- all Christians must regain our focus and find our voice again. We have been so busy fighting with each other, within our own denomination and with others; we have been so busy trying to grab political power cloaking it as a stance on 'family values' or 'pro-life'; we have been so busy being politically correct; we have been so preoccupied with the numbers game ('why that church in Texas has 25,000 members!') that we have lost sight of who we are, whose we are, and why we have been put on this earth."

The Rev. Canon Patrick P. Augustine, rector of Christ Church in La Crosse, Wisconsin, noted the history-shaping events of the past four years, the 9-11 attacks, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. He told his congregation on September 11 that the Christian responsibility in the world today is to "look through the lenses of the Gospel of hope, grace and love. Let not hatred win, to divide and destroy our faith communities."

'Called to be prophets'

In the gospel for September 11, Jesus tells Peter he must forgive not seven times but seventy-seven times. "It turns out to be hard to preach a sermon about forgiveness when there's so much to be angry about," the Rev. Susan Russell told the congregation at All Saints in Pasadena.

However, she said, that is what we must do. That and to "go set somebody free -- that is our Christian mandate -- that is the work we have been given to do. As the Body of Christ -- as Jesus' hands and feet at work in the world -- we have both the power and the responsibility to bless as we have been blessed ...."

St. Mark's Fisher told his congregation, "I do not want us to leave here today thinking that the Christian life is just a glorified United Way agency. Christians are not only called to fill the world with the presence of Jesus' love. Christians are called to live on the edge, fearless in the opposition and bold in our proclamation against injustice. Christians are called to be more than relief workers; we are called to be prophets."

Templeton invoked the message of the prophets. "God judges a nation not by the strength of its military or the wealth of its most powerful citizens, but by the care of its poorest and most vulnerable people," she told her congregation.

The Rev. Donald Fishburne of Saint Michael and All Angels Church on Sanibel Island told his congregation on September 4 that he'd always heard Jesus' admonition that "the poor you have with you always" as an opportunity to serve others, but that in the past week he saw those "others" as brothers and sisters.

"I am coming to know and feel in my bones that when the waters of death come for us all, we're all in the same boat," he preached. "Rich and poor, black and white, male and female, we're all alike, we're all the same, we're all in need of God's saving grace."