Lost Tribes

"GIVE THANKS" for...in my Parent’s house are many mansions…"

John 14.2 (NIV inclusified)

Part of my journey with MCC, was the discovery of black theology, which transformed my spiritual life and ushered growth. It enabled the communication of my experience, on a private and a public level, into words and phrases that were understandable to my listeners. And in return, it encouraged an ongoing conversation about the meaningfulness of our own experiences as people of African descent. I stopped my search for words to express myself, I found a vocabulary to dialogue with others. I stopped feeling lost in a European cultural and theological context that provided very little to hang on too. I found my spiritual home.

However, our daily lives, tend not to be enriched by the academic world of theology! The day to day realities of life, require a more pragmatic language that speaks to our hearts and our spirits, in a manner that touches our experiences and our life styles. But perhaps, we need to come home first?

I was reading a broadsheet newspaper (on line) and came across an article on the dream of a return to Israel . It concerned a tribe, the Bnei Menashe, of northeast India , who claim to be the descendants of the "tribe of Manasseh, a son of Joseph" and their quest to be "recognised as descendants of the ancient Israelites". The article also mentioned the Lemba tribe, a "bantu speaking people in Southern Africa with genetic similarities to the Cohanim or Jewish priestly class". This helped my recall of a television documentary, aired last year on prime time TV, that substantiated their claim, through subsequent DNA testing, of being the direct descendants of the Levites. The article also reported on the emigration to Israel , of approximately 65,000 Ethiopian Jews "believed to be descended from the lost tribe of Dan."

For these "lost tribes", the spiritual and theological significance of having one’s claim authenticated, being classified as "found" and then recognised for residency, by Israel, is profoundly transformational. And such joy - unimaginable joy at returning home after centuries, after millennia, of exile. I feel for my African ancestors, forcibly uprooted to the Caribbean through slavery, and then domiciled through colonialism. I think of those, who through economic necessity and a sense of duty to the ‘mother country’ migrated to Britain in the late 1940s and 50s. I think of myself. Landed - here in the U.K. And whilst I may be far from my ancestral home and constantly yearning for "back a yard " - I am not "lost".

Wherever we see our natural home; land of our origins, land of our exploitation, land of our birth, or land of our choice – we have a spiritual room; a home, a mansion, whose walls are waiting to reflect our cultural wallpaper. Do we wait to be "found"...or do we know who we are in Christ? Do we treasure our cultural & ancestral roots and the geographical routes of our journeys, whether of African or European descent? Are we home?

Live your life, and be empowered by the Holy Spirit of God.

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