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.