Cousins

Please watch this video first.

With everything else which has been happening…
All the attention focused on the Presidential debate and the tragedies in Tulsa and Charlotte and the ongoing devastation in Syria and the Sudan and elsewhere in the world, you may have missed this other headline in the news. On September 21st, The New York Times (Carl Zimmer. Science. September 21, 2106) reported on three independent studies by geneticists seeking to settle the controversial question of human expansion out of Africa. The article reported  this:
In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

Did you get that?
All non-Africans today…everyone in this room…a single population.
Do you know what that means?
It means we are related.
I may be your crazy uncle.
Or, you shy cousin twice removed.
Or, your doting grandfather.
Somewhere in double helix of DNA we are linked sharing great, great, great, great to the nth degree grandparents.

And, do you know what else that means?
It means that, in its own unique narrative, the witness of the Bible is correct.
We share a common humanity.
We are children of the same God.
What we celebrate today as we recognize the global community of which we are a part is more than just a dream for tomorrow, but instead a tangible reminder of who we really are. Bread and cup a reminder of that deep, too often forgotten, memory of shared history. Shared ancestry. Shared journey. And, with it this hope. That maybe on that day when we remember who we are and who we are in relation to each other is the day we will turn in the direction of peace.

So today, I invite you to both to dream and to remember because you may…
You do…
Have a cousin in this room.