When the Whole Room Couldn't Help but Sing

On a Tuesday evening in March 2019, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason stepped onto the stage at London's Royal Festival Hall and began playing Elgar's Cello Concerto. The audience sat in practiced silence — this was, after all, a classical concert with unwritten rules. But something happened in the second movement. A woman in the third row began swaying. A teenager in the balcony closed his eyes and let his head fall back. By the final movement, when Kanneh-Mason leaned into those soaring, aching notes, something broke open. The audience didn't just clap — they rose. Some wept. Strangers turned to one another with wide, knowing looks, as if the music had said something their own mouths could not.

The psalmist understood this impulse. "Sing to the Lord a new song, for He has done marvelous things," he writes. But then the call expands beyond the congregation. The sea is invited to roar. The rivers are told to clap their hands. The mountains themselves join the chorus. The praise the psalmist envisions is so fitting, so overdue, that it cannot be contained in human voices alone. All creation recognizes what God has done and cannot stay silent.

That is what real worship looks like — not polite applause, but the involuntary response of a soul that has witnessed something marvelous. When the Almighty acts in salvation and faithfulness, the only fitting reply is a new song that pulls the whole room, the whole earth, to its feet.