Looking on at the destruction and suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina, we are again confronted with dark and elemental truths that we prefer to avoid: namely, that for all the impetus to life and creativity that surges through the universe, the scale of suffering and loss at every level of the creation is staggeringly beyond comprehension; that the history of the world is largely the history of lost and blighted souls; that in the order of nature, in times of terror and calamity, we are each bound to save ourselves and leave the world's wounded to perish.

Add to the random destruction and suffering of what we call the natural world, all that human beings contribute themselves. Whatever the complex of reasons for it, the complete breakdown of social order and the descent into brutal anarchy remind us that our human capacity for violence lies just below a civilized surface.

And people of faith, all faiths, have added to the measure of suffering through acts of cruelty done in apparent obedience to a God of love.

A week from now will be the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. Since then we have discovered that Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban hate the Christian west more than they hate death itself, enough so to slaughter their own Muslim brothers and sisters.

But Muslims are not the only ones to glorify and valorize war. Some Christians have added fuel to this fire. About a year after the 9/11attacks, on November 16, 2002, Franklin Graham, Billy's son, appeared on the NBC Nightly News and derided Islam as "an evil and wicked religion." Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, denigrated the prophet Muhammed as "a demon-possessed pedophile" in his annual address to the convention in 2001. And a short while ago, on his television program The 700 Club, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (an ardent critic of President Bush).

Granted, there have been various justifications for different wars. Countries have waged war for territorial expansion, retaliation, protection, self-defence, or to stem the tide of evil. It goes without saying that ethnic, economic, political, cultural and historical factors converge in a complex cocktail when people wage war.

The Christian Church has tried to justify the ways of God in relation to the terrible tale of violence and suffering, often in ways that offend intelligence and common decency. I make no attempt to explain such suffering today, but rather simply to look again at our situation in the light of today's readings.

Consider two of the Old Testament texts for this week. Exodus 12 describes the institution of the Jewish feast of Passover that commemorates Israel's liberation from 430 years of bondage to slavery in Egypt. Liberation from oppression is a good thing, and always worthy of celebration. As a liturgist, I'd like to focus on the details of the Passover observance, but given our present situation, I cannot blot out the terror and violence that hovers around the edges of the text. The writer of Exodus construes Israel's emancipation to include Egyptian subjugation. Today we would say that the horribly-oppressed became the new oppressor, except in this instance the writer insists that Hebrew revenge was the very act of the Lord God. It is the Lord who will "bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt." In something akin to divine infanticide, the Lord will slay the first-born of every Egyptian, from the highest in Pharaoh's house to the lowliest prisoner languishing in a dank dungeon, even including the firstborn of Egyptian livestock. It was as if there was sudden infant death syndrome throughout Egypt that night.

It is a dark and terrible story. The writer uses various words: plague, a pestilence, some kind of epidemic that kills quickly. Biological warfare.

The killing of the firstborn only ought not to be interpreted literally. If there is an historical basis to the story, it likely means that no household is left untouched. The natural order has gone berserk. Creation's natural order has boomeranged. Pharaoh had sought to kill all the male children of Israel - a genocidal act. Now the firstborn of Egypt are to suffer a comparable fate.

In a departing act of humiliation, the Hebrews looted and plundered their Egyptian oppressors.

Or consider the schizophrenic zeal in Psalm 149 for this week. The first half of the Psalm describes dancing, singing, music, and praise of God. But the instruments of worship like tambourine and harp give way in the second half of the psalm to weapons of war like swords and shackles:

May the praise of God be in their mouthsand a double-edged sword in their hands,to inflict vengeance on the nationsand punishment on the peoples,to bind their kings with fetters,their nobles with shackles of iron,to carry out the sentence written against them.This is the glory of all his saints (Psalm 149:6-9).

I love the rather anaemic understatement in the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible (1991) footnote to Psalm 149: "The dance was evidently of war-like character." No kidding! Perhaps the enemies of the Psalmist somehow deserved their humiliation, perhaps there is a mysterious divine providence at work in the rise and fall of nations, or maybe you could read this as the normal but tragic rhetoric of military conquest. Whoever laughed at the notion of poetry as a political act? But a simple reading suggests that for the Psalmist it was a very short step from pious praise to religious rage. He glorifies the religiously righteous who brandish a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other.

Even some of the closest followers of Jesus evidenced indifference and hatred. When a beleaguered crowd besieged Jesus because he actively welcomed and healed them, the twelve disciples urged Jesus to "send them away" (Luke 9:12). When someone outside of the Jesus movement tried to heal a person, John boasted with misplaced pride, "Master, we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us" (Luke 9:49). Toward the end of his life Jesus set out for Jerusalem. When he passed through a village of the despised Samaritans and they refused even basic hospitality to him, James and John spewed their venom: "Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them?" (Luke 9:54).

After three hundred years of sporadic, state-sponsored persecutions of Christians, most of whom were the peripheral and the poor, the Roman emperor Constantine credited his military victory over his rival Maxentius at the Battle of Milvan Bridge to the Christian God. Tradition says that on the evening of October 27, the night before the battle, Constantine had a vision of a cross emblazoned on the setting sun, and the Greek letters XP, the first two Greek letters of "Christ," superimposed on it. Constantine either saw or heard the phrase, often rendered in Latin, "In Hoc Signo Vinces"-"With this sign, you shall conquer." Constantine, who was a pagan at the time, put the symbol on his solders' shields, thus transforming a sacred symbol of innocent, redemptive, suffering love into a talisman of violent, hate-filled, military conquest.

Somewhere deep within the human psyche there seems to reside a dark and primitive impulse toward hatred, exclusion, and deadly violence. Perhaps to justify ourselves, or to calm our deep insecurity, we insist that God not only sanctions our hatreds and our causes, whether personal or national, but that He himself hates our enemies and at some points in history even exterminates them. But when God hates all the same people that you hate, you can be confident that you have created God in your own petty and paltry image.

So, thank God for Paul's text for this week, in which he borrows a passage from the Torah to instruct the earliest followers of Jesus: "Love your neighbour as yourself" (Romans 9:9 = Leviticus 19:18). The only debt we should carry, he says, is the never-ending debt to "love your fellow human being." Loving your neighbour fulfills any and every other divine command, for genuine love "does no harm to its neighbour."

The German Pastor Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984), who protested Hitler's anti-Semitic measures in person to the Führer, was eventually arrested, then imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau (1937-1945). He once confessed, "It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. [God]is not even the enemy of [God's] enemies."

So the gospel today includes some tough talk about living a kind of community life that cuts through the usual human cycle of cruelty and revenge. To be sure, churches are not always notorious hotbeds of charity. This text sounds like uncongenial counsel about discipline and exclusion - and indeed, it has been used in just such a way - yet Jesus' final words about erring brothers and sisters who resist admonition is that they be regarded as Gentiles and tax collectors. The lowest of the low, right? And yet it is always such outcasts who are the focus of Jesus' ministry and by extension, the concern of his followers. In other words, the errant brothers and sisters are to be even more the focus of love and outreach.

When Jesus' promise ("It will be done") is attached to whatever the community agrees to ask, we may be confident that when and where we ask for forgiveness on behalf of an erring member, there the empowering presence of the risen Christ is "among us." We see then that greatness in the kingdom has to do with the way in which the believing community we learn the extravagant discipline of forgiveness.

The Passover meal continues to serve the Jewish people as the means of making the exodus redemption of an enslaved people real and effective for subsequent generations. So today we gather at a meal which is for the forgiveness of sins, for all who are, as it were, Gentiles and tax collectors.

At this liturgy we proclaim that a brutal judicial murder laid bare once and for all the truth of our capacity for violence, and yet offers in return life and forgiveness. Eating and drinking today, praying for the forgiveness of our sins, may we love what Niemoeller learned: God is not the enemy of my enemies. [God] is not even the enemy of [God's] enemies.