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.”
It absolutely must be true that Jesus historically and really rose from the grave. Otherwise we have pinned our hopes on nothing. We, like fools who know nothing of the desert, have wasted our life’s energy chasing a mirage. We have believed a hoax. Indeed, many people have rejected the Christian faith precisely because they cannot confirm our central assertion: Jesus is risen from the dead. Of all the reasons to reject Christianity, this is the most sensible, for it at least understands what is at stake.
Because Jesus is alive, the claims he made about himself have been proven true. He is indeed God’s own Son. He took upon himself the sin of the world and through his death won forgiveness for all who trust him. God raised Jesus up on the third day and gave him all authority on heaven and earth so that we could believe His words, “Because I live, you shall live also.”
If you are familiar with the words of the gospel, do not mistake familiarity with sensibility. There is nothing of common sense or common experience in Easter. It is not easy to believe in the resurrection. When we celebrate Christmas there is at least a note of possibility. We have seen babies born. The same is true of Good Friday: people die. But to what may we compare the empty tomb? Nothing. It is unique. Utterly supernatural. Easter morning exposes to us the mystery that under girds all we believe about Jesus.
By “believe” we mean something more than just intellectual assent. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not merely an event of history that we acknowledge. It is not simply a creed we recite. We must respond to the resurrection, we must be changed by it. If God raised Jesus from the dead and therefore truly will raise each of us to life as well: What implication does that have for our lives right now? How shall we arrange our priorities today if resurrection awaits tomorrow?
I am sure that at one time or another, many of you have had a certain entertaining question put to you that has been put to me. What would you do if you only had one day to live? Easter puts a different question to us: What will you do, if you would live forever?
Isn’t it amazing that Easter so often falls at the same time as our taxes are due? It is that old render to Caesar and render to God thing. Let me take this moment to point out that what you render to God is deductible when you are figuring out what to render to Caesar.
I have not prepared many Easter sermons. I have been doing “fill-in” preaching for a quarter of century, but I rarely get a chance to preach on Easter. For some reason, ministers do not take Easter vacations. In fact, every Easter sermon that I have ever written has been to preach here at Park. So here I have been this week, worried about doing my taxes on time, and worried about getting everything done for Easter.
Isn’t it strangely appropriate? What could be more mundane than filling out tax forms? What could remind you more of death? And at these very mundane moments, I am obligated to meditate on that which is outside of my world. I must meditate on the message of Easter.
The entire message of Easter is that the mundane is no longer what it used to be. Our old thoughts, our old goals, our old relationships, even our old selves must pass away. There is much more out there than we have ever imagined. Our choice is to accept or reject that new life, but we can no longer deny it.
Imagine for a moment that you are a chick in its egg. You are safe. Your mother has kept you warm. You have been feeding off of the yolk sack that the egg provided. What if you just decided not to be born? Being born is hard. You have to peck your way out of the egg. The world you find might be hostile. But one thing is sure. The world that awaits you is larger than anything you can possibly imagine. It is a world where life takes on an entirely new meaning and adventure is around every turn. What will you choose? Will you choose the safe, but restricted life of the egg? Or will you choose the adventure of a new type of life all together?
C.S. Lewis once wrote, "You cannot go on being a good egg forever. You must either hatch or rot."
In the movie, Chicken Run, dozens of chickens are held captive in the prisoner-of-war-like camp at Tweedy Farms. Ginger is the chicken mastermind who keeps devising new plans to help her fellow chickens escape. Ginger knows that when a chicken’s egg production is down they will face the chopping block. Ginger dreams of a place where the grass is green and the chickens can be free.
In a chicken coop organizational meeting Ginger shares her new escape plan with the chickens. They have tried going under the fence, now they will find a way to fly over the fence. Ginger encourages the chickens to imagine a place on the other side of the fence where the grass is green, a place where there is no farmer, no egg counts, and no chopping block.
Some of the chickens have a hard time seeing the place Ginger imagines. One chicken says, “Perhaps we should just try not escaping.”
Ginger responds “What kind of life do we have just laying eggs until we get whacked and stuffed. . . Don’t you see, the fences aren’t just in the yard; they’re in your mind.” [repeat The fences are in our mind]
The chicken gruffly answers back, “The chances of us getting out of here are a million to one.”
“There’s still a chance then,” Ginger replies.
This morning I want us to be set free to dream a dream that is bigger than we are; let’s be set free from the fences in our mind to have a Spirit-inspired imagination greater than Ginger’s dream for the chickens to fly to freedom. I want us to “Dream a God-Sized Dream.” With a Holy Spirit-inspired imagination we can dream a dream bigger than we are. Dream that we have a God who changes death into life.
Too many times I have played the part of Humpty Dumpty as I stayed on the wall, walked the fence between serving good and evil. Just like old “Humpty”, I fell off of the wall too. All my “king’s horses” of personal accomplishments, education, abilities and reasoning could not repair the damage to my life, and all my “king’s men” of self-righteousness and self-determination could not repair the damage to my spiritual life.
Thank God, what I could not do and what no Psychologist or Psychiatrist could do, what no human counselor could do, God can do! He can take my scrambled egg and shattered eggshell of a life and put it all back together again and make it even better than before! His banner over me is Love and His love is powerful enough to go to the Cross and die for me that my ignorance and sin can be forgiven and washed away in His precious blood.
Mrs. Wilson , a Sunday School teacher asked her class to write one sentence each on "What Easter Means to Me." One pupil wrote: "Egg salad sandwiches for the next two weeks!"
Young Harold had a really bad case of Attention Deficit Disorder. On Palm Sunday, Harold’s Sunday School teacher sent empty plastic eggs home with each of her students. Mrs. Wilson told them to bring something back in the eggs next Sunday to represent Easter. She really didn’t expect Harold to bring anything, because he never listened in class. The next Sunday her children brought their eggs back. Susan had a pretty spring flower inside her egg. Joey had a little cross in his egg. Jackie had put a plastic butterfly in her egg. But, just as Mrs. Wilson suspected, there was nothing in Harold’s egg. She was surprised that he even remembered to bring it back! She had praised each of the other children for what they brought, but she didn’t say anything about Harold’s empty egg. Harold looked at her with anticipation and said, "Mrs. Wilson, you didn’t say anything about my egg!" Mrs. Wilson said, "But, Harold, you don’t have any reminder of Easter in your egg." Harold replied, "Uh-huh! It’s empty just like Jesus’ tomb!"
As you entered this morning, each of you should have received an egg. In it was some symbol of the season. Now is the time to open the egg.
Whatever you received, I’d ask that you spend some time today meditating on that aspect of Easter.
But it is not the egg in your hand that matters. What matters is the egg that symbolizes your life. So what will you do with the egg that is your life? Will you live a life with no real purpose or meaning? Will you be dominated by the mundane and the trivial? Will you give yourself over to nothing more meaningful than money, or prestige, or position? Or will you make a different choice?
Will you put to death that old life and spread your wings to lead a new life in Christ? No, God will not remove you from your mundane existence, but God will put your life in perspective. You will begin to see a vision of the heavenly and the eternal. You will find a purpose beyond yourself. You can hatch. You can be more than you ever have been or anything that you have imagined. You can become a child of God.
Easter Sunday, more than any other day, needs to be a day of decision. We all were far from God. The religious word is sin, but what it means is rebellion. God created us for one purpose, but we chose another. God saw our separation, and sought a way to bridge the gap that we created. While we were yet sinners, that means while we were still alienated from God, God sent his son to give Himself as a sacrifice. The purpose of that sacrifice was to bring us back into a relationship with God. Christ was crucified, He was buried, and He rose again. It is that resurrection that we celebrate at Easter. The amazing part of that story is not that Christ was raised to new life. After all, He was God. The real miracle is that we were raised to new life with Him. In some supernatural way that none of us can truly comprehend, our own weaknesses were nailed to the cross with Christ. And just as our old selves have died with Christ; our new selves were reborn in Christ’s resurrection. All we have to do is accept the reality of what Christ has already done for us.
This can be your moment. If you have already accepted Christ as your savior, this can be your moment to dedicate yourself again to living the life that Christ provided for you. If you have never accepted the gift that Christ offers. God wants you to live as His child. Nothing you can ever do could ever bridge the gap that exists between you and God. Your only hope is to accept what God offers. God loves you. God forgives you. God wants you as His child. Will that happen? That is up to you.
