The Choir That Shouldn't Have Sung Together

In December 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled, conductor Daniel Barenboim gathered musicians from East and West Berlin to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. For twenty-eight years, these artists had lived under separate flags, educated in rival conservatories, and taught to regard one another with suspicion. Some had lost family members to the wall's brutal divide.

Yet there they stood, shoulder to shoulder, bows lifted over the same score. When the final movement swelled into Schiller's "Ode to Joy" — that thundering declaration that all people become brothers — hardened musicians wept openly. The audience, packed with citizens from both sides, rose as one. Not because the wall had fallen, but because music had given them a shared language before the politics caught up.

Paul understood this kind of unlikely harmony. Writing to a Roman church fractured between Jewish and Gentile believers, he didn't minimize their differences. Instead, he pointed them to the same score — the Scriptures that spoke of hope for every nation. "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing," he wrote, "so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope."

The Almighty never asks us to pretend our divisions don't exist. He invites us to stand shoulder to shoulder over the same ancient story — and discover that its music is large enough to make us one.