GordonMoyes.com

The election of Barack Obama has revealed a new coalition of evangelicals that have ended the dominance of the old fundamentalist religious right. I have written months ago the reasons why Obama would win the Presidential election. They proved to be right.

The sounds of spring are everywhere. The trouble is that other sounds drown them out. Outside Parliament House, each week, we have hundreds of protesters about this or that, shouting, chanting, booing and demonstrating. The early hours of the morning when I am supposed to be sleeping in the city, are always shattered by the sounds of sirens and horns from ambulance, police and fire vehicles driving to some emergency. I always pray when I hear those sounds, for the emergency personnel who are speeding to the crisis, for the victim of whatever has occurred, and for all those who work while our city sleeps.

God has answered prayer in the USA presidential elections. The people voted for Barack Obama as many churches, prayer groups and Christians prayed they would. These Christians, including an extremely large number of evangelical Protestants (a number that was growing every week of the campaign) prayed that more citizens would see that the Democratic Party candidate, was more in line with God’s will for the country than the candidate of the Republican Party.

I was sitting at the window of a building high over Macquarie Street the other night, looking over Sydney Harbour. It was one of those Spring nights when we had had a torrential downpour during the afternoon. The Botanical Gardens were verdant green, sparkling from the cleansing rains. The sky was piled with black clouds, piling one on top of another. The late evening sun plied soft gold colours into the black clouds. The light drizzle glistened in the setting sun, as if diamonds were falling. Between the mountains of black clouds, there were a few blue patches giving the promise of a new day tomorrow.

The Victorian Parliament recently passed the most liberal abortion laws in Australia, rejecting all of the proposed amendments. I was there speaking with the Parliamentarians at the time and encouraging a pro-life vote. It was obvious that the old arguments no longer carry weight in the political realm. For fifty years we have argued on the same premise.

Over twenty years ago, ministers who were discerning the times, noted that Biblical scholars were examining most Christian beliefs in the light of the most recent discoveries in archaeology, new manuscripts, new understanding of the Jewish mind-set in the time of Jesus, and re-examining well-accepted Christian understanding as they did in the 1880’s, 1908, 1928, and 1948.

Many of us garden just for the sheer joy of it. My wife gardens because she really loves it, the digging, the planting, the propagating, the weeding, and the harvesting. I do not enjoy most of that. But I love reading about it, seeing it, talking about it, walking in it, and above all planning out what we can do, how we can do it better and how we can make a significant capital improvement to our property.

The Wall Street crash of 2008, the Main Street Housing mortgage crisis, the Australian Stock Market crash, the Government rescue packages in every country, and the belt tightening by every citizen everywhere is the fruit of decades of financial greed, lack of regulation, and speculative use of the share and property markets. It means that Gordon Gekko and his philosophy “Greed is good” have finally brought the world to a halt.

I have told you previously that Beverley and I are keen on our garden. In the article “Grow Your Own Veggies” I described our two vegetables boxes, waist high and four metres long by a metre wide. That is so that, as we grow old, we do not have to stoop or kneel to tend the vegetables. The boxes are built from thick, rot resistant timber slabs, and filled with a layer of rocks for good drainage, then a thick layer of soil, then a layer of composted soil, then a layer of cow manure and finally some mulch.

If your computer is like mine, it has been stuffed with very long Presidential e-mails from Rev Fred Nile, extremely long explanations from Wally Vanderpoll from the CDP Office, and extremist emails from Michael Darby with syrupy religious talk designed to win naïve Christians.