If you think yesterday’s passage was bleak, then the following chapter is worse. It talks about how the path of unfaithfulness to God leads to poverty. One is left with an image of Israel stripped naked, cast out, starving, and unable to enter the city, for she is outside the fence of civilization. The analogy with what we have done to the women in my generation is painfully accurate.

For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’
Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths.
She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them,
and she shall seek them but shall not find them.
Then she shall say,
‘I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.’
(Hosea 2:5-7 ESV)

But the prophet is not really talking about his wife, but instead Israel: I have shortened the passage. Because we have to think if we have been faithless ourselves: if we have as a church, as a nation, as a culture abandoned God.

I am spending this weekend at a Chamber music camp which is being held at Holy Cross, Mosgiel. This was a Catholic Seminary: it is a large, quite Catholic Institution, and parts of it are quite beautiful. We are allowed to use the chapel: it was deconsecrated some time ago. All New Zealand Catholic Priests train in Auckland, (But not on the St John Campus, with the Anglicans and Methodists.

So we end up with this:

The question we have to ask is why we are in this state. Why has the church collapsed: it is not the playing to the stringed instruments that is illicit nor (to my reformed eyes) having the kettle drums in front of what used to be the altar: it is that the Church is not as strong as it was, nor as it should be.

We have forgotten the Psalm. All nations should praise God.

To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Psalm. A Song.

May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us, Selah
that your way may be known on earth,
your saving power among all nations.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you judge the peoples with equity
and guide the nations upon earth. Selah
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!

The earth has yielded its increase;
God, our God, shall bless us.
God shall bless us;
let all the ends of the earth fear him!

(Psalm 67 ESV)

All nations should praise God. We should be asking for good things for this nation so that God will be praised, not that New Zealand will be seen as a shining light. There is no holy city in this world: the prophets were scathing about Jerusalem.

Our instruments, our craft, our music, our art are not bad things; but the worship of our creativity instead of God is a bad thing. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with being paid to do these things: we are paying tutors to coach us at this camp, and we should do this, and the people who painted the frescos in this chapel, who built it should have been paid, and paid well.

But the fear is that we have abandoned God. It may be that the witness to this, the sign of this, is akin to that mentioned by St Paul: that women have abandoned their natural affections, which he mentions immediately after noting that men have been abandoned to the perverse desires.

And it may be that not as much about being Gay as being faithless, allowing desire at the wrong place and the wrong time, and worshipping that which is created and designed, and not the God who made us in his likeness, including the wish to create and build.