Faith Matters: Empty Easter Eggs Are a Reminder of an Empty Tomb

“Who’s ready to hunt eggs?”

Mark Shepherd, children’s pastor of St. Charles First Assembly of God Church asked that question a dozen or more times as he readied the crowd for the Community Eggstravaganza egg hunt Saturday in .

The egg hunt had been rescheduled for the weekend after Easter because the original date, April 23, was too rainy.

The delay didn't dampen the enthusiasm of the children who turned out to hunt for the 14,000 eggs the church had filled with candy and tokens the they could exchange for a prize.

Children ages 5 and younger had their own hunting area by pavilion No. 3, while the 6 to 12 year-olds collected eggs in Bum’s Hollow.

When Shepherd asked for 12 adults to help with the scattering of eggs, I volunteered. It is not as fast or easy as it looks to distribute the eggs all around that large bowl-shaped area of the park.

The older youth took off at breakneck speed down the grassy slope when the hunt began.

“You missed some!” I shouted to those around me as I held up two perfectly good eggs. No one even looked my way.

It look less time for the children to pick up the eggs than it did for the adults to put them down. And then each plastic egg was opened for the prize tokens as well as the candy.

Although the traditional egg hunt happened after the Easter holiday, the activity is still an appropriate one.

Easter is not just a day, it is a season celebrated in the church for 50 days until the day of Pentecost, which is the celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The Easter greeting, “Christ is risen,” and response “he is risen indeed,” is a greeting for the duration of the Easter season, not just one day.

Sunday was the second Sunday of Easter. We continue to speak of the risen Christ in our hymns, sermons and communion prayers and blessings.

An empty egg is a visual often used to remind children-- and adults --of the empty tomb of Easter morning.

The Saturday after Easter, a hillside in St. Charles was full of reminders of the empty tomb.

That message was reinforced on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, during an Easter egg hunt held by First United Methodist Church.

The Rev. Robin Roderick, lead pastor of the church, told me that this year church members “went around the neighborhood and handed out fliers two weeks before” the event to help promote it to the community.

It worked. By noon, the church had served 350 hotdogs, and the kitchen crew was heating up more. More than 400 people came to the community egg hunt, the largest turnout in 10 years.

Palm Sunday was a gorgeous day, sunny, warm and dry. First United Methodist Church has a traditional-style church building built with red brick, white trim, double doors to the sanctuary and a prominent steeple. Children ran and skipped on the front lawn, finding eggs filled with small surprises inside. As I watched, I thought, this is a quintessential church event.

While everyone was in the sanctuary, even with the inevitable noisiness of that crowd of children, a church staff member spoke to us and asked, “Why Easter eggs?”

The staff member reminded us that Jesus was “full of surprises," from the surprising way he treated people, such as Zaccheaus, a man who was not very well liked, to Jesus' surprising healings, his surprising teachings and the greatest surprise--the empty tomb.

There are surprises in the plastic eggs, and when the treats are removed, each egg is a reminder of the great and wonderful surprise of the risen Jesus and the empty tomb.

Did the message get across to all those children? Maybe not then.

Perhaps later when the baskets were home and the eggs were there, open and empty, perhaps when the children played with those empty eggs, they might remember the answer to the question:

Why Easter eggs?

Jesus is not there! The tomb is empty!

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed.