Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, “Why didn’t God do something? Where was God when all those people died?”

Among the answers we might consider is the one that Martin Luther gave as his wife asked a similar question upon the death of their infant son. Luther answered, “The same place he was when His son died!”

There are a lot of bad answers. One is that suffering is God’s plan. Someone is likely to quote from the Bible and tell us that “all things work for the good.”

The God revealed in Jesus did not come into the world “to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”

There can be no arguments over the claim that, for many reasons, our nation deserves punishment. But when the Bible tells us about the grace of God, it is giving us the good news that our God does not give us what we deserve.

Certainly, God would not create suffering for innocent people, who were Katrina’s victims.

Perhaps we would do well to listen to Rabbi Harold Kushner, who contends that God is not really as powerful as we have claimed. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures does it say that God is omnipotent.

Kushner says that omnipotence is a Greek philosophical concept, but it is not in his Bible.

Instead, the Hebrew Bible contends that God is mighty. That means that God is a greater force than all the other forces combined.