Each week we carefully curate a collection of poems that resonate with the lectionary readings for that week (Narrative Lectionary and Revised Common Lectionary).
*** Revised Common Lectionary ***
Lectionary Reading:
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
CLASSIC POEM:
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.
CONTEMPORARY POEM:
Every Hour Here
The Innocence Mission
We ride our bikes
around the circle in the cemetery,
weaving.
I wave up to You on the Cross.
Am I to come upon You suddenly like this forever?
Happy, relieved that You are here
and I can see You, I can feel You?
You are like the ticket-half
I find inside the pocket of
my old leaf-raking coat.
There all the time, all the while,
forgotten.
I so often seem to leave You
in churches
and other islands.
And on my beads
where I can see You, I can feel You.
I take the ticket-half
and put it on the table, saying,
This is God
and He’s here through my comings
and my goings.
But I walk past the ticket-half,
I walk past the ticket-half.
I walk past the ticket-half
just as I’ve walked past the Cross on our wall.
Our self-importance grows so dazzling we don’t see
You.
But Gentle Jesus, aren’t You always,
aren’t You every hour here?
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