While looking around at the exhibits in the visitors' center at Yosemite National Park, I came upon one on pikas and climate change. For some reason I've always been enchanted by pikas, small, alpine mammals that are cousins of rabbits. (If you've never seen the video of the pika singing Freddie Mercury, google it.)
Being alpine creatures, pikas cannot tolerate hot weather, and the exhibit explained how, during the heat of summer, pikas must retreat into their burrows to cool down from time to time. Warming temperatures are not only forcing pikas to ever higher elevations, but the exhibit worried that the need to spend increasing time cooling in their burrows would mean pikas would not be able to forage enough food for the winter.
I wonder what God thinks about starving pikas. People often speak on the things that are bothering God at the moment. God is disturbed because prayer has been "taken out of schools." God is upset by the secularization of our culture. Recently there was new coverage of a NJ mayor who inveighed during a township committee meeting that a law requiring school curriculum to instruct on the political, economic, and social contributions of LGBT people was "an affront to Almighty God."
There is a post I see every so often on Facebook that notes the certainties of some Christians about God being furious over same sex marriages or some other hot button social issue and then wonders why God wasn't similarly upset by the centuries long enslavement, torture, rape, murder, separation of families and more of people of color by Christians in this country.
If Christians are going to speculate on what God is angry or upset about, wouldn't you expect the list to be very similar to the things that Jesus got upset about? Yet in my estimation, those Christians who are most certain about what is infuriating God rarely seem to share much from Jesus' list.
I have to think that those things that so bothered Jesus still upset God. Jesus spoke of visiting prisoners and feeding the hungry, of good news for the poor and oppressed, and of wealth as a curse. If God gets upset that the same things that upset Jesus, why doesn't God make that upset clear? Why doesn't intervene on behalf of the poor and weak?
I don't have good answers to such questions. If I were God I'd be making late night visits to lots of politicians to spur them into action on the climate, healthcare, and income disparity. But I'm not God and God clearly has other plans.
If Jesus is our best picture of God, then we have met a God who suffers for us, or perhaps because of us. In Jesus, the innocent suffers for the sins of the guilty. It is a pattern that repeats all to often in our world. Immigrant children do not deserve to be in separated from parents and housed under atrocious conditions. Children born into poverty do not deserve to have limited educational opportunities and substandard healthcare. And pikas did nothing to cause climate change.
Too often Christians have spoken of the cross as a magic formula where Jesus suffers for us. But what if the cross is more about God's solidarity with those who suffer? God enters into the suffering of those at the bottom, suffering inflicted by the powerful. In the gospels stories, Jesus' suffering and death isn't brought on by immorality or failing to follow the rules. It is brought on by an unholy alliance of imperial power and organized religion, both of whom fear a God aligned with the least and the lost. That is no less true today.
If Jesus is the image of the invisible God, then I can only imagine that God weeps over children in detention centers and over starving pikas. But God rarely seems to act, at least not in ways that are apparent to me. Perhaps God expects those who claim to walk in the way of Jesus to act, to side with the weak and vulnerable in ways that infuriate the comfortable and powerful. Perhaps God weeps most of all for a church that so often worships wealth and desires power.
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