If you are about my age or older you remember back before backspace and delete. Before word processing. Before that magic tape in a Brother electric typewriter that would somehow lift a typed character from a page–but only one or two characters back and only if the typebars were perfectly aligned. Back before White-Out. Back when there were typewriter erasers. Typically disc shaped pink erasers attached to stiff plastic brushes, though some later ones were pencil shaped with a stiff plastic brush at the opposite end of the cylinder.

Labor Day, celebrated May 1 around the world, and on the first Monday in September here in the United States, is supposed to be about the workers. About those who have built our economy, our cities, our roads.

I’m going to start this morning by talking about Norwegian independence day, because that’s what one does on Palm Sunday, right?

To set the scene:

My most recent ministry was in a small Unitarian Universalist church just outside of a town of 400 people.