Dying To Live Series

A Preacher found a shoe box in a closet. He opened it and found strange contents. Inside was an egg carton with 5 eggs inside. Next to the eggs was a stack of bills that totaled over a thousand dollars in small bills.

As soon as his wife walked through the door he stopped her to ask if she knew anything about this odd combination. ‘Yes, dear, after we got married I decided that after every sermon you preached if it was a bad one I would put an egg in this shoebox’. The preacher thought with pride about all the years they had been married and that only 5 eggs were in the box. ‘But honey, what about all that money?’ ‘Oh, well every time I got a dozen eggs I sold them’.

The largest egg: ostrich measuring 17.8 by 14 cm (7 by 4.5 in). That is about the size of a cantaloupe. It weighs over 3 pounds. You could put 4700 bee hummingbird eggs inside one ostrich egg. The ostrich egg is the largest single cell that exists on our planet today. There were dinosaurs that laid larger eggs. These is a dinosaur egg at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that is about the size of a basketball

The largest egg laid relative to body weight: little spotted kiwi at 26%

The smallest egg laid relative to body weight: ostrich egg at 1.5%

The smallest egg: West Indian vervain humming bird at 10 mm (0.39 in) in length and 0.375 g (0.0132 oz). That is less than the weight of 2 paper clips.

But the egg we are most familiar with is the chicken egg.

Did you know?

An egg shell has as many as 17,000 pores over its surface.

There are 150 species of chicken.

Chicken are descendants of the red jungle fowl (gallus gallus spadiceus) that lives in Asia.

The chicken is one of the first domestic animals, appearing in China around 1400 BC.

Can’t remember if an egg is fresh or hard boiled? Just spin the egg. If it wobbles, it’s raw. If it spins easily, it’s hard boiled.

A fresh egg will sink in water, a stale one will float.

Eggs contain all the essential protein, minerals and vitamins, except Vitamin C. But egg yolks are one of few foods that naturally contain Vitamin D.

The color of the egg shell is not related to quality, nutrients, flavor, or cooking characteristics. White shelled eggs are produced by hens with white feathers and white ear lobes. Brown shelled eggs are produced by hens with red feathers and red ear lobes. Brown egg layers usually are slightly larger and require more food, thus brown eggs usually cost more than white eggs.

China produces most eggs, at about 160 billion per year. In the US, about 260 million hens produce more than 65 billion eggs per year. A hen can lay about 250 eggs per year.

This is the fourth and last installment in a series of sermons on the paradoxes of Christianity. Next week we will start a new series on some of the great women of faith. I have called it “The Sacred Feminine” in deference to Dan Brown and his book, The DA Vinci Code. But our current series is on paradoxes. We talked about the paradox of doing Good Works as an act of Faith. We talked about finding freedom through obedience. We talked about Jesus as the Humble King. Today, on this Easter Sunday, we are talking about dying to find new life.

At the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, a silent protest was carried out by Brezhnev’s widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev’s wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed: she reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband’s chest. There, in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life. She hoped that Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband. She made the sign of the cross.

If you remove the resurrection, Christianity has no power, no purpose; it would be as if you took the engine out of your car. It might be nice to look at, but it is useless. As Paul wrote, “If Christ be not raised from the dead then our preaching is empty, and you have believed in vain. You are still in your sins, and we are, out of all the people in the world, the most to be pitied.”