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.