Anyone who knows me knows that I love playing strategy games. For more than 5 years I have routinely, almost weekly, gathered together with friends to play a variety of games. Over my Thanksgiving break I had the joy of playing one of those games with my parents and they loved it! On our last evening together we needed a break from my game and so we played one of their favorites: Dominoes. And what better time than Christmas to spend some time talking about Dominoes!
Dominoes is one of those games that is easy to pick up on because there aren’t that many rules and is a lot of fun for young and old alike. Basically, your goal when playing is to get rid of all of your tiles before your opponent by strategically connecting your tiles to tiles already in play. Each tile has 2 numbers, designated by dots, which restrict your ability to connect tiles. If the end of a tile has 3 dots on it, for instance, you can only connect that to a tile with 3 dots on one or both ends. Since tiles have 2 numbers on them you can string your tiles together so that you can connect a tile with a 3 on one end to a tile with a 5 on one end using a tile that has both a 3 and a 5. This 3/5 tile connects 2 tiles that could not otherwise connect because it is able to connect to them both.
So what does Dominoes have to do with this Christmas season? Jesus! As I’ve been thinking about connecting I can’t help but look at what God did in Christ. Who Jesus is and what he did reminds me an awful lot of that connecting 3/5 tile. “Man that he might represent us, God that he might save us.” This is a statement I heard years ago in college in regard to the divinity and humanity of Jesus. Some may even refer to Jesus as the Godman because of the understanding that Jesus was both divine and human. It is because Jesus is both divine and human that a door is opened for an amazing connection between God and man.
Jesus is how God connects to us
When we think of the incarnation, or God becoming flesh, we generally just think about the birth narrative of Jesus but that is incomplete. God didn’t just become flesh in Christ, but also experienced everything that we fleshy people experience in our lives. From the time when Jesus was wrapped in cloth and placed in a manger until the time when Jesus was wrapped in cloth and placed in the tomb he connected with our entire humanity. Jesus celebrated at a wedding at Cana in Galilee. He had a close group of friends he shared life with. He was filled with sorrow and cried when his friend Lazarus died. He experienced rejection when people turned away and no longer followed him. He felt the pain of deep betrayal when Judas sold him out and Peter denied even knowing him. And finally, he felt the sort of physical pain we can barely fathom and ultimately experienced death itself. God connects to us by experiencing what we experience and that happened in Christ.Jesus is how we connect to God
Jesus describes his close relationship to the Father throughout the book of John and ultimately he says to his disciple Phillip that anyone who has seen and heard him has seen and heard the Father himself. How do we know what God the Father is like? Jesus. How do we know what God the Father feels about us? Jesus. Jesus has an intimate relationship with his Father and he wants to share that with us. He invites us to experience what he experiences. It is difficult to connect with someone you don’t know and since Jesus wants us to know his Father he helps us out big time. Time and again he makes it clear that what he is saying and doing ought to be directly connected to the one that sent him, the Father. He is doing what his Father does. Jesus is how we connect to God.Jesus is why we connect to others
In 2 Corinthians 3 we see that as people connected to God in Christ we have a role in this world as ambassadors. This tile chain doesn’t end with God connecting to us in Christ. God wants to go a step further. God wants us to be a connecting tile too! In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul talks about how we are uniquely gifted and how we all have different roles within the body of Christ. In Dominoes there are a variety of number combinations on the tiles and so each tile has the ability to connect in ways that other tiles don’t. The church, with its diverse members, has the ability to connect to a diverse world. The end result is a tile chain that connects God to our world and reconciles this world back to God.Knowing how far God had to reach in order to connect with us, how far will we reach to connect to people this world? Knowing that we are uniquely designed and gifted by God and for His purposes, where can you be a connection between this world and Christ?
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