You feel it before you can name it. You’ve been there.
A song starts in a crowded room, and it pulses in your
chest as you hear it in your ears. Tomorrow night, down
in Miami, when that fight song breaks out, the air in
the room will change, and I won’t know the words.
I’m forever a Blue Devil. But when in Rome—or in
Bloomington—you join the song anyway. We all know
that familiar feeling: that rush when a crowd of strangers
becomes a single voice. That sense of belonging. What
the sociologist Émile Durkheim calls “that collective
effervescence.” It may not be a sacred moment. But it
has its elements.
That’s how John experiences heaven. When the door
opens, he doesn’t enter a muted library or a quiet
chapel. It’s more like a stadium. And John is the late
arrival to an unending worship service. He stands in a
cascade of sacred strangeness. Thunder that rattles the
floorboards under his feet. Lightning that shears the air
in front of him. And in the middle of it all, there is music.
It is constant. It is relentless. It is Heaven’s chorus,
singing without ceasing:
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was and is and
is to come.
We know those words. We sing them here. Perhaps
you know them by heart. But be careful. You should
know what you’re signing up for when you join this
choir. Because in Revelation, worship is dissent. These
hymns are not lullabies meant to put us to sleep; they
are choruses of courage designed to wake us up.
It helps to know that in the first century, music was the
connective tissue of the Roman Empire. Every public
festival, every royal procession, every athletic contest
was punctuated by hymns, hymns to the emperor.
To sing those hymns was to belong to that story. To be a
citizen of that realm. To belong to that kingdom. To sing
was to belong.
When the creatures in John’s vision cry “Holy,”
they are not giving God a compliment. They are
committing treason.
In the Roman Empire, there was only one called
“Worthy.” His name was Domitian. He sat on a
throne of marble. He claimed the title Kurios Theos.
Lord God. Emperor worship was civil religion. By
praising a Jewish peasant who was executed on a
Roman cross, the church was engaging in dangerous
liturgy, subversive worship. They were refusing to
be assimilated to the civil religion of the time. Every
note they sang reflected their refusal to bow before
an idol. They were saying in their worship that the
most powerful man on earth was just a footnote. They
belonged to a different story, citizens of another realm,
a more permanent kingdom.
This is what the marginalized have always done. When
even holy words are coopted, it is music that resists.
I think about the “hush harbors,” those secret places
deep in the woods of the American South where
enslaved people gathered. The system of chattel slavery
tried to turn human beings into ledger lines, to crush the
soul until all that was left was a body to be used.
But then, late in the night, a song would start. Hymns
to reclaim God-given breath. Sometimes they would
overturn a large iron wash-pot or sing into a quilt to
muffle the sound. They were burying hope like a seed in
the ground. They were constructing walls of dignity from
sound in a frequency the Empire could not hear.
Those songs marched out of the fields and into the
streets. In 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten
in a Mississippi jail cell—bleeding, exhausted, her body
broken—she didn’t give a speech. She didn’t draft a
statement. In her cell, she sang “This Little Light of
Mine.” Inmates in nearby cells joined the song.
Tyrants are not afraid of armies; they command larger
ones. They fear anyone who keeps singing of a Savior,
because you can lock the body in a cell in Winona,
Mississippi, or Birmingham, Alabama. You can exile it on
the Isle of Patmos. But you cannot handcuff a melody; it
spreads like wildfire. When all else fails, the song persists.
I have witnessed widows standing at their husband’s
gravesides, hearts shattered, voices shaking—and they
sing anyway. Their song is a defiant declaration to death
itself: “You may have taken his breath, but you will not
take the victory song.” I have heard the voices of men
singing hymns before dawn at the shelter, lifting their
own voices against the words of the world—words like
worthless, dirty, bum, dangerous. Words to reclaim
dignity. I’ve witnessed teenagers, arm in arm, singing
and sobbing outside school buildings, while the police
lights still flash.
Empire is a kind of shapeshifter. If it cannot break your
body, it will try to steal your song. It will pipe its anthems
of fear into your ears until you forget you ever knew
another tune. It will convince you of its own inevitability,
that the world is governed by force and you might as
well get used to it. It’s just the way things are, have
always been.
Too often the church blends right in. Too often, we stay
silent when neighbors are targeted because we don’t
want to be “political.” We trade the choir for the comment
section. We mistake cruelty for strength and mercy for
weakness. We choose our comfort over courage.
But these compromises have consequences too. Because
we become what we worship. If you bow to the beast, you
begin to reflect its monstrous instincts and destructive
ways. Howard Thurman—whose work shaped the mind
of a young Martin Luther King Jr.—put it this way: “As a
Christian, I must see to it that what I condemn in society, I
do not permit to grow in me.”
Listen. The first Christians weren’t persecuted for
worshiping Jesus—Rome could make room for that.
They were persecuted for refusing to bow before
Caesar. Come what may, they could not do it. The faith
that had taken root in them was too strong to allow
them to bow before idols. And neither can we. We
cannot sing praise to God on Sunday and make peace
with hatred on Monday.
Because that is how we lose our souls.
Thank God there is another way.
We gather in this room not to escape from the world but
to remember which world we call home. Every Sunday
is a rehearsal. We practice the language of the Kingdom
so that tomorrow morning, when the world demands we
sing its song of bitterness, we have another one ready in
our lungs.
That is what Revelation is: a gift of clarity. When
John enters Heaven’s throne room, he does not leave
the earth behind; he sees it for what it is. With its
marble thrones, its overwhelming power, its fear and
contempt—it’s all smoke. Vapor. Temporary shadows
of a passing world. John insists the song we sing is
the only thing that is real. It was here before the first
stone of Rome was laid and will be here when the last
monument to tyranny has crumbled into the sea.
And yet. Not all who claim the name of Jesus are singing
his song.
Some loud and insistent voices are teaching another
tune. Their liturgy confuses the throne room of Heaven
with the halls of human power. They’ve made the gospel
sound like it’s a march to conquest—and dare call it
gospel. They’re writing bills, shaping curriculum, revising
history, catechizing a generation that the kingdom of
God looks like the triumph of a tribe. That holy means
powerful. That blessed means winning. That it’s the
church’s job to dominate.
But that’s not our faith. It is only the empire in
church clothes.
We have to be honest about this: our children are
being catechized. Every single day. Every screen.
Every algorithm. Every angry voice claiming to speak
for Jesus is teaching them a song. The question is
whether they’ll learn this one first. Whether they
learn the melody of mercy before they’re handed the
drumbeat of domination.
That is what’s at stake in this room. That is what we
are doing when we sing.
I imagine you are weary. Me, too. I imagine that
some of you may have come here today wondering
if this hour could be anything more than a brief
reprieve from a world that doesn’t care what we
sing. You might feel like you don’t have a single note
left in you.
I need you to hear this: that is exactly when the song
matters most.
It occurs to me that the powers of this world can
handle our anger. In fact, they are calibrated for it. They
know exactly what to do with our rage. Despair feeds
the machine. But your God-given joy? Your hymns of
unending praise? That witness is ungovernable.
And that is why we sing.
We sing because there is a promise etched into the
fabric of creation itself. There is a day coming after
this day. That weeping may last for the night, but joy
comes in the morning. That the City of God will one day
descend and merge with the city of humankind.
So please, church—do not stop singing.
Sing because the widow at the graveside knows a
courage the power-hungry cannot fathom.
Sing because the saints sang through their darkest
nights and left the melody behind for you.
Sing because the children sitting in these pews are
watching you right now, and they desperately need
to learn hope’s tune before the world teaches them
something else.
I think the powers of this age want us to forget there
was ever another melody. I think they are determined
to invade your imagination and convince you the way
things are is the only way they could be, that the future
belongs to the most ruthless.
But I trust that because you have stood in this room, you
have felt the beat of a deeper truth. I trust that because
you have been in this space, you have seen the glow of
a brighter light. And you now know the truth. You know
this secret.
The Empire is loud because it is terrified. It is desperate,
and it is dying. As for the song, it does not need to
shout. It does not need to coerce. It does not need a
pageant of human power. It is the heartbeat of a God
who will not be silenced. It is the promise of a Lord
whose law is love. It is the only thing that lasts. It has
already won.
So, do not let anyone steal your song. Do not let anyone
turn your mercy to rage.
Go with music in your heart no power can crush. Keep
singing the world to come.
Amen.