Sunday, April 06, 2014

Water Sermon **


    Last service,  Enfield Congregational Church,
    Spring 1938

Brethren, today our text is from the Book
of Water. Two hundred years ago
Pastor Edwards preached at another Enfield,
our surviving sister in Christ’s Connecticut.
He said God’s wrath is like great waters
and nothing but His pleasure holds them back,
a doomed stream, to be sure, pissed
into the firestorms of his homily --
but who could resist the siren call of Water  ? 

In the beginning there was Wind, moving
over Water. There was Word, spoken
by a voice of Water, then of Wind.
It said Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
There were voices in the wilderness,
of freshwater people in a place of small ponds,
saying keihtan, hobbomok, manitou.
In fog, upon a hilltop, one bare tree
yoked heaven and hell. Some saw a bird,
some an open book, others a man
splayed on its branch. Eels insinuated
at its roots. 
                      While the ink was still wet
on the meat pact struck between God and Abel
the east wind put on its flesh of water.
Soon great miasmas would settle in
like an offering of  blankets borrowed from
a lazaretto.  They heralded downpours.
But only one powaw and his webb
foresaw the flood and fled to the mountains
carrying a hare.  There they met Cain,
pockmarked by God’s inoculation,
immune, untouchable. He was what God
made him, a tiller of fields. We must read
the Book of Water for what the Pentateuch
left out between disregard and murder.
Even Jonathan Edwards could not keep
to the gospel of water, and unleashed
fiery floods of God’s fierceness and wrath
which rushed forth with inconceivable fury.
Brethren, let us pray. Our waters loom.

Three hundred years ago John Eliot
sounded God's trumpets of wrath against all vice
at First Church, Roxbury.  Evenings, he walked
between the fencerows twined with bittersweet
and past swamps aglow with ignis fatuus 
thinking  foolish fire, will-o’-the-wisp ,
a man must receive Christ in his own tongue,
feu follet, irrlicht, fuego fatuo,
in these twilights one could mistranslate
jack-in-the-pulpit as skunk cabbage,
its spadix tittering beneath its spathe,
as window lattices twist to eelpots,
Holy Ghost to Manittoo, Satan
to Abbomocho, God to Cautantouwit --
and Christ ?  Wétucks walked across water,
turned men into fishes, but could he explain
Election to a barbarous-tongued heathen ?

With Cockenoe and John Sassamon,
a slave and orphan, both captive-schooled,  
he wrestled King James into Massachusett.
At Nonantum, in 1646,
he drew his first lesson from Ezekiel,
reading     Come from the four winds, o breath,
and breathe upon these slain that they may live,
Then, for his flock, built fourteen praying towns,
where they would live as Christian Englishmen --
subdued, monogamous, waistcoated, shorn --
free from the Devil’s trappings. Sassamon,
Namasket’s minister, Metacom’s scribe,
shuttled back and forth between two worlds
superimposed in a complex double warp
he could not weft. And here we return,
O brethren, to the Book Of Water:
they found him drowned in Assawompsett Pond,
midwinter, after he’d warned the Governor,
that King Philip, né Metacom, meant war.
Three Wampanoags hanged;  one was spared
by a rope weaker than the strands of evidence
that had convicted them. The war was on.

The praying towns became internment camps,
then waystations to exile, then empty.
The Christian Indians huddled on Deer Island,
froze, starved, sickened, died. They left trails
of Indian Bibles from each praying town,
that converged at the icy harbor, then stopped. 
New England, the Puritans had declared,
was a vacuum  domicilium, unfenced, unhoused,
thus, with God’s blessing, theirs. That towns
could shift with seasons was inconceivable.
They could not hear God speaking in a fire,
in water moving over stones, or wind through trees.
The signs they disregarded, blinded by
Election and Property ! When the blood tide ebbed
Eliot surveyed his valley of  dry bones
of  Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Englishman.
They seemed reconciled in anonymity.
He prayed Come from the four winds, o breath,
and breathe upon these slain that they may live.

O Brethren, we might as well implore
the coming flood for mercy. There is none.
We stand at the brink of our exile, Europe of war.
What is our sin ? We called the pure impure,
dressed rape in righteousness. For this, we drown.

St. John, the watery apostle, provides
our last lesson, baptizing us with water
as Christ does with spirit. Lord Jesus Christ
turned water into wine at Cana,
told Nicodemus that he must be born
of water and of spirit to know God,
asked a Samaritan for water, promised her
a spring of water welling up to eternal life,
healed the afflicted at Bethzatha’s pool,
walked across the sea of Galilee,
preaching  if  you thirst, come to me and drink,
and out of  your heart shall flow rivers
of living water, washed disciples feet,
then hanged, saying I thirst.  The vinager
burnt his parched lips. Blood and water flowed
from his side.
                        And thus it comes, O Brethren,
the living water -- clear, bright as a crystal,
flowing from the throne of  God and Christ
down the middle of the street of the city,
past the Baptist Church, King Philip’s Inn
and Eliot Junior High, watering
the Tree of Life with its twelve kinds of fruit
one for each month,  whose leaves are for
the healing of nations. Let the thirsty come
and drink this priceless water. Amen. Amen.

3.22.98

** In my long series of poems about the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir, I imagined this last sermon preached in The Congregational church in Enfield, Massachusetts before the town was flooded.   

2 comments:

Clawson said...

So weird, Paula, I was just preaching your Qabin to a young reporter who's interested in the waterways of Massachusetts. I came here to grab your URL for him and, Bingo!, good old Jonathan.

'Tis a fine, fine book old friend.

Bob

Paula said...

Aw, Bob...thanks !

PT