WEST BURKE, VT — Union Congregational’s Easter sunrise service concluded at 6:15 a.m. Sunday, a full seventy-two minutes before the sun actually crested Burke Mountain and made the event technically accurate.
The bulletin, printed Thursday at the parsonage on a Xerox that Reverend Marcus Kilbourne has been nursing since 2011, listed the service as running 5:30 to 6:15. Kilbourne, a man who arrives everywhere fourteen minutes early and expects the same of celestial bodies, closed with the benediction at 6:14, thanked the twenty-nine attendees for coming, and released everyone into a fellowship hall where the sun had not yet occurred.
“The bulletin said what it said,” said Kilbourne, who declined to characterize the sun’s tardiness beyond calling it “a matter between the sun and the Lord.”
Fourteen congregants took their coffee and cinnamon doughnuts back outside and stood in a loose semicircle on the church lawn, facing east, watching the sky turn a color that Dot Havermeyer, 74, described as “the exact gray of an old dishrag.” At 6:53 the sky was still gray. At 7:12 a rooster somewhere on the Averill Road began a series of tentative announcements. At 7:27 the sun finally cleared the ridge, at which point four of the fourteen were still there.
“I stayed because I’d said I would,” Havermeyer said, standing in a windbreaker over her Easter dress. Her husband Bob had gone home at 6:40, citing his hip. “The others left because of eggs.”
The children’s egg hunt at Union Congregational, scheduled for 8:00 a.m. sharp, does not adjust for atmospheric conditions and requires setup time. Kip Meloche, 19, who has run the hunt for two years and takes it more seriously than most people take their jobs, was already hiding plastic eggs in the boxwood hedge by 6:22 and did not look up when the sun eventually appeared over his left shoulder.
Asked whether next year’s bulletin might build in a buffer, Kilbourne said he would consider it but wasn’t making promises. “The Lord’s timing is the Lord’s timing,” he said, standing in front of a coffee urn at 7:15 in a sanctuary lit entirely by fluorescent bulbs. “We have a schedule to keep.”
By 7:30 the parking lot had refilled with families arriving for the egg hunt, most of whom had not attended the sunrise service and none of whom asked how it had gone. Reverend Kilbourne is expected to deliver the same benediction next Sunday at 10:00, a time at which the sun is generally accepted to already be up.