When the Whole Stadium Sang

On July 2, 2023, sixty thousand fans packed Wembley Stadium in London for the final night of Coldplay's Music of the Spheres tour. Midway through the concert, Chris Martin stopped playing and asked the crowd to sing the chorus of Fix You without the band. What happened next went viral — sixty thousand voices, strangers from dozens of countries, lifted a single melody into the night sky. The sound was so enormous that nearby residents reported hearing it from blocks away. No one conducted them. No one handed out sheet music. The song simply swept through the crowd like a wave, and every voice — trained or trembling — became part of something far bigger than any individual throat could produce.

Psalm 98 imagines something even grander. The psalmist hears the seas roaring, the rivers clapping their hands, the mountains singing together before the Lord. This is not polite worship. This is creation itself unable to contain its praise, bursting out in a new song because the Holy One has done marvelous things.

Here is what strikes me: at Wembley, those thousands sang because a pop star invited them. How much more should we lift our voices when the One who shaped the rivers and spoke the mountains into existence has revealed His salvation to every nation? The psalmist says the whole earth should break into joyous song. Maybe the question is not whether creation is singing — but whether we have joined in.