Easter Memories
by Monty Keeling
updated 4/11/2004

 

What is it now 53 years of Easter memories?

Easter is the real Christian religious observance. Christmas was just a Santa come lately celebration that the common folk in the early church thought up as something to do while the Roman folk were celebrating their mid-winter festival of lights. But Easter has always been pure Christian and the observance that the faith is built around.

My own Easter experiences stretch from Florida to California with stops at Chicago, Kansas City, Mo., Rocky Ford, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona, thrown in between.

There were those early Easters at the Messiah Church of the Brethren in Kansas City. Grandpa and Grandmas from both sides of the family, aunts, uncles, and miles of cousins all mostly attending the church at that time. All I cared about was getting the whole thing over with so we kids could get back to our Easter baskets filled with goodies. Like many Easters those Sundays started out with sunrise service and a bunch of wired and red-eyed kids.

Easter was that way through junior high even though our family moved away to Kansas and later to Chicago where my father could attended college and then seminary before being called into the ministry. We usually managed to get back for Easter with the family.

Moving to Tucson, Arizona in the mid-60s changed all that. My father pastured a struggling congregation which would eventually grow to over 100 in attendance. Most of those Easters some of our Kansas City relatives found their way down to us. You’ve never experienced an Easter Sunrise service until you’ve done so in the Arizona desert. The sunrises are breathtaking. That is, except for one year when our youth group hiked down the Grand Canyon over Easter weekend. We all got up expectantly at 7 A.M. for sunrise service but the sun didn’t make it over the crest of the cannon until 11 A.M.

By the time I was a sophomore in college my dad had accepted a pastorate in Bakersfield, California. Home of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and a lot of rich Oklahoma farmers who migrated to the Central Valley during the depression. Those Easters started with sunrise services east of town in one of the city’s largest cemeteries. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were following ancient tradition. The first Christians often worshiped and held communion in just such places. The pagans all thought those Christians were nuts. They couldn’t understand why anyone would celebrate something as awful as death.

At 32 years age, and after playing around as a journalist for seven years, I settled down, got married and decided to enter the ministry myself. Three two hard record cold winters in Chicago followed. Churches in the Chicago and Northern Indiana areas, I’ve discovered, rarely celebrate Easter sunrise service because the sun seldom shows up. During my third year in seminary I got up and video taped the sunrise so that it could be shown at the 10 A.M., “sunrise service” at the Naperville Church of the Brethren. I think it was the first time many of those people had seen a sunrise during Easter in their lives. But my best memories of that time were the Easter egg hunts organized at our seminary and watching the excitement of our two daughters scrambling for their fair share. Oldest daughter Christy, then in fourth grade, would end up splitting her treasure with Erica, then in kindergarten. Erica was never fast about anything.

My first pastorate took us to the eastern plains of Colorado. A little town out on Highway 50 named Rocky Ford. I don’t really remember much about those Easter services. One Thursday Love Feast and Communion does come to mind, however. We had decided against the usual Brethren mode of sitting the men and women separately and decided to have all the families sit together even the children. This meant our son Nathan, then just a baby learning the joys of voice fluctuation was in attendance. As I got up to read the scripture Nathan decided upon hearing daddy’s voice he’d help out also. His loud yelps of joy pretty much sounded out my scripture reading. I remember telling some of the deacons after the service this is probably why Jesus never had any children.

Next stop was Goshen, Indiana and three years of holding sunrise services where, you guessed it, the sun always refused to show up. But we persevered anyway,. Now I’ve been in the Goshen for over 10 years and moved from the pastorate to the factory and building CStation on the Web. Those last seven years, especially, have been hard ones. Filled with family hardships, personal struggles, divorce, the death of loved ones, changing churches four times for different reasons… Easter at times during some of those years has seemed pretty hallow. But, as always happens where Christ is involved, life always follows death.

Two years ago Easter took on a special meaning when celebrated with  my first grandson, Hunter David Gross, and now his younger brother Aiden Daniel Gross will be showing up any day. (He was scheduled for last Wednesday.) Most of the family has relocated to sunny Florida where sunrise services can actually happen! God's promise of new life through difficult circumstances remains true.

God is good.