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According to the Domino Effect, one thing leads to another.
It can be great fun to stand up hundreds of tiles in creative patterns. Then your only task is to knock down the first tile, step back, and enjoy the action.
Some people take this more seriously than others. Participants in the Netherlands’ annual Domino Day compete to invent the most complex and spectacular effects.
On November 18, 2005, one team decided to go for broke. They created a domino field that utilized 4,345,027 tiles, a global benchmark that is still unsurpassed. Along the way they set nine additional records. It took more than an hour for all the dominoes to fall.
Even with four million tiles, the only thing that really has to happen is the first thing. Everything else follows.
And what if that first thing is an event like no other, such as the alleged resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? Even Hugh Hefner understood what was at stake.
The founder of Playboy and celebrity embodiment of the all-about-me lifestyle wasn’t a particularly big fan of God. He acknowledged in an interview before his death that there was probably something like “the beginning of it all,” and that God might be defined as the Great Unknown.
Did he believe in the resurrection? “If one had any real evidence that, indeed, Jesus did return from the dead, then that is the beginning of a dropping of a series of dominoes that takes us to all kinds of wonderful things. It assures an afterlife, and all kinds of things that we would all hope are true.”
Hefner appears to have remained a skeptic to the end. But he grasped that if that first spiritual domino was really there, and if it somehow was put into play in one’s life, you would never know where things might lead.
The apostle Paul was of the same mind. Take away the resurrection and the whole scaffolding of Christianity comes down.
Social critic Gertrude Stein famously commented about her hometown of Oakland, California, “There’s no there there.” If the resurrection turns out to be nothing but sentimental bunk, the religion game, at least for Christians, is over. There’s nothing there worth paying attention to.
Here’s how Paul put it, as rendered in the Bible paraphrase called The Message: “If there’s no resurrection, there’s no living Christ. And face it — if there’s no resurrection for Christ, everything we’ve told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you’ve staked your life on is smoke and mirrors. Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised up Christ — sheer fabrications, if there’s no resurrection” (I Corinthians 15:13-15).
But if the Easter story is really true, it’s the ultimate first domino.
Tip it over, and it will knock down another domino, and that one will knock down a third. And by the time it gets to our lives, it has the power to change everything.
Living as if Jesus is alive and well and ruling the cosmos will change the way we pump gas and make coffee and read to our kids and sacrifice for others and respond to social media and shop for Halloween candy and wait in that long line and pray for people we don’t know and deal with that cantankerous relative and wake up on Friday mornings and serve beyond our comfort zones.
All it takes is tipping over that first domino: Lord, show me how to live as if Jesus is really alive.
And before we know it, four million other things are happening that we didn’t even see coming.