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Sermon - "Lessons From the Coal Mines"
 I tried to think of what Pennsylvania is famous for, other than that fortunate baseball(yes, I know it’s football) team, the Pittsburgh Steelers…. then I thought, of course, of coal.
With a little Internet searching I learned that the Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania was blessed with much of the world’s deposits of anthracite coal (that’s the good coal). Beginning in the early 19th century, after a method of burning anthracite in open grates was perfected, the Wyoming Valley experienced tremendous growth as coal fueled our country’s industrial expansion. Waves of immigrants, first the English, then the Welsh and Irish, followed by Italian, Poles and Eastern Europeans, arrived, settling in places with names like Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, looking for the opportunity of a better life that work in the mines seemed to promise. The mine owners grew wealthy, the mine workers risking their lives going into the mines to remove the coal from the ground did not. There were numerous underground disasters over the decades because safety was not a priority of the mine owners.
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