I just found the same thought, expressed in better words, by our friend NT Wright (here):

” But in our contemporary world, and even in the churches, the voice of prophecy has become silent, or merely silly. Some have suggested that the foot-and-mouth epidemic is God’s punishment for specific sins; an ultra-Protestant sect declared it was because the Queen visited the Pope not long ago; a sensitive soul wrote to me to say it was because of blasphemy in a particular movie. The trouble is that caricatures like that make us shy away from facing the fact that we humans are called to be stewards of God’s creation and that when we fail, as we obviously have been failing for quite some time (with half the world hungry and the other half over-fed), it isn’t the case that God is sitting upstairs a long way away deciding to zap us with some arbitrary punishment, but that, as with Israel in Isaiah’s and Jesus’ day, we will reap the consequences of our own selfish and arrogant choices, and that when we do this is not something other than the sorrowful wrath of our loving God. If we are to do joined-up thinking in our political life - and the present crisis has shown how far we still have to go on that front - it is vital and urgent that part of the joining-up is the theological dimension of all reality.”