Every Flag, One Song

On June 21, 2015, worshippers packed the TD Arena in Charleston, South Carolina — just four days after a gunman murdered nine people during a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church. The crowd was Black and white, old and young, Baptist and Methodist and Catholic. They spoke with Gullah accents and Midwestern flatness and the soft drawl of the Lowcountry. Some wore clergy robes. Others wore jeans and work boots. A few still had hospital bracelets on their wrists from the vigil nights before.

And then they began to sing.

Thousands of voices — broken, angry, grieving, hopeful — rose together in one sound. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound." They didn't sing in unison because they agreed on everything. They sang because something larger than their differences had called them into the same room.

That is the vision John saw when the heavens opened. A multitude no one could count — from every nation, tribe, people, and language — standing shoulder to shoulder before the throne. They had not arrived clean. They had come through the great tribulation. Their robes were stained with suffering before they were washed white in the blood of the Lamb.

The seal of the living God is not a shield against pain. It is a promise that pain will not have the final word. Every tongue that has ever cried out in anguish will one day cry out in praise: "Salvation belongs to our God!" And the song will be loud enough to hold every voice that was ever silenced.