Charlemagne’s Children

A researcher at Yale believes that nearly everyone in the United States can trace his or her ancestry through Charlemagne. The apostle John easily tops that assertion: Children of faith, he asserts, not only are children of God, but resemble their heavenly Father.

It’s a well-known truism that — according to the Bible — we are the children of God.

Did you know that we are also children of Charlemagne?

If you’re of European ancestry, you’ve got royalty in your blood. You’re a descendant of Charlemagne, a distant relative of this master of Western Europe known as “Charles the Great.” Living from 742 to 814, he ruled as King of the Franks and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and worked tirelessly to spread commerce, education and Christianity.

Granted, today our congregations are multi-culturally, and multi-ethnically diverse, creating a wonderful mosaic of cultural, generational and ethnic traditions. Yet, the question is an interesting one: How can this particular ethnic strain — the European — of which there are hundreds of millions of persons, be linked to and through Charlemagne? It doesn’t seem plausible.

The secret is our shared genetic material.

Think for a minute about how many ancestors you have. Sure, you know that you have two parents...