Country Church by Liberty Hyde Bailey - Poem for the Third Sunday in Advent, Year B

The Englewood Review of Books curates a weekly series of classic and contemporary poems that resonate with the themes of the lectionary readings. Here is one of the poems for this coming Sunday (More poems for Third  Sunday in Advent can be found here)

This poem was selected to accompany one of the
lectionary readings for the coming week,   1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

Country Church
Liberty Hyde Bailey

In some great day
The country church
Will find its voice
And it will say:
I stand in the fields
Where the wide earth yields
Her bounties of fruit and of grain,
Where the furrows turn
Till the plowshares burn
As they come round and round again;
Where the workers pray
With their tools all day
In the sunshine and shadow and rain.And I bid them tell
Of the crops they sell
And speak of the work they have done;
I speed ev’ry man
In his hope and plan
And follow his day with the sun;
And grasses and trees
The birds and the bees
I know and I feel ev’ry one.

And out of it all
As the seasons fall
I build my great temple alway;
I point to the skies,
But my footstone lies
In commonplace work of the day;
For I preach the worth
Of the native earth, –
To love and to work is to pray.

*** This poem is in the public domain,
  and may be read in a live-streamed worship service.

Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954) was an American horticulturist and botanist who was cofounder of the American Society for Horticultural Science.  Bailey is credited with being instrumental in starting agricultural extension services, the 4-H movement, the nature study movement, parcel post and rural electrification. He was considered the father of rural sociology and rural journalism. (via Wikipedia)