Michael W. Waters
Chalice Press, 204 pages
With “Something in the Water,” Michael W. Waters vividly offers the church the charge that “in times like these, we must wake up! And stay woke!” Waters imbues this varied and engaging group of sermons, poems and historical inquiries with the voice of a preacher and the feet of an activist.
He expertly weaves W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. with Tupac Shakur, Spike Lee and the multitude of voices that make up the Black Lives Matter movement. He knits heart-grabbing stories with bare facts, and chases a prophetic moral vision with the kind of blunt realism necessary to meet the realities of our current moment.
Waters indeed takes us on a modern odyssey, a journey that tracks, often unflinchingly, the highs and lows of a lived experience that holds the simultaneous knowledge that “there is something in the waters of America that continually brings harm to Black, Brown, and Indigenous people” with the ceaseless hope, as he echoes King, that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Waters holds those two realities in such a poignant tension, keeping nuance and meaning as he weaves between biblical proclamation, poetic meditation and searching structural analysis. Racism, on personal and systemic levels, “is not there by accident, but rather by design,” he notes, and “the grief it has wrought is immeasurable.” But, throughout the course of the book, as any good preacher is wont to do, Waters never leaves us without a call to action and an entreaty to hope. He writes in a continued refrain, “We must work to purify these waters until ‘justice flows like waters, and righteousness, like a mighty stream.’ ” And even when that hope feels distant, Waters locates God moving in the space of everyday, consistent work.
In the closing pages, Waters gifts us with a rousing series of rhetorical questions that give voice to this entire project: “Who here tonight is ready to stand for peace … to stand for truth … to stand for righteousness … to stand for justice?” Having drawn us in, he then implores us: “Let’s continue to stand, let’s continue to work, let’s continue to fight, let’s continue to give until justice flows like water and righteousness like a mighty stream!” For me, and I can only imagine for many readers, the response will be: Amen. May it be so.
Pastors looking to connect a congregation’s understanding of the work of King with the current Movement for Black Lives, or those simply looking to wade more deeply into the stream of what it looks like to live out an anti-racist faith, need look no further than Waters’ sharp and engaging collection of sermons, poetry and social critique.
Jordan Tarwater is the executive director of the Urban Outreach Center of New York City and serves as the Jan Orr-Harter Minister of Social Justice at Avenue Church NYC on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. You can find him on Twitter @JordanTarwater.
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