by By Tohru Inoue
When everything comes together in musical worship, it’s glorious. I’ve been in settings where Kenyans are clapping, Ethiopians are swaying and Brazilians are belting out songs in Portuguese! We throw in some verses in German, French and Spanish for the other cross-cultural workers and it’s out of this world! It feels like a little piece of heaven on earth. The sound occasionally makes me wonder what heaven’s worship will be like?
Blame it on growing up with Western classical music but when I think of heaven’s sound I think of the likes of Handel’s Messiah. Growing up, my father had a vast classical record collection organised alphabetically from Bach to Wagner. I listened to those warm, scratchy recordings played by world renown orchestras. It’s the sound I think of when I think, glorious.
Singing Handel’s Hallelujah chorus in a choir, in a concert hall, was a bucket list item for my wife. She got to fulfill that dream one time when we were in Canada. I sat near the back of the packed concert hall and let all the words wash over me.
“And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed!”
“Who shall stand when he appeareth?”
“Unto us a child is born…”
The Hallelujah chorus was the one time we were all invited to sing along with the choir. People stood and the whole concert hall joined in and sang like we were in heaven itself. What a thing!
There are times I imagine heaven’s music being like that, but even more magnificent, majestic, glorious. I imagine it making Handel’s piece sound like it was played on a kazoo. I imagine the opening note of heaven’s music to be capable of sending those on earth straight to heaven! The kind of sound that has you saying, “I must have died!”
Now, to get the Messiah right in the concert halls on earth you have to have over 50 people practicing and nailing their parts for over two hours. People follow the score and play every note the way they’ve practiced it. So what would it take to produce heaven’s even more glorious sound up there? Also practice?
I can’t imagine practices in heaven though. Can you imagine a conductor, with their back to God, making sure the choir all came in at the same time? Can you imagine stopping the orchestra in practice to say they were not fortissimo enough and to start again from bar 105? Would we pull ourselves away from the worship of God to go practice?
Maybe the music will be much simpler in heaven. Maybe it’ll have similar words to Handel’s (after all, the words come from scripture) but without the complex melodies or instrumentation. Maybe just voices, and maybe not just the professional ones but also all the riffraff like the ones in the concert hall who were invited to sing the chorus that day.
Maybe heaven’s worship is the one that will sound like it’s being played through a kazoo. You know, for all the “normal” voices in there.
Maybe it won’t be as polished sounding. But it will be glorious for other reasons.God will be there. Like the host who’s always been there but we’re now just meeting face to face for the first time. He will be like the sun. There will be no more tears, no more sorrow, no more aches.
“And the glory of the Lord shall be revealedand all flesh shall see it together.”
“And he shall reign for ever and ever.”
I don’t know if I’d have the wherewithal to pull off complex harmonies. Confident and wordy on earth maybe, but would likely be mute before him. It may take everything I have to regain my composure.
Maybe what we hear on earth isn’t a “little sample of heaven,” but really just as it will be. A collection of the “normal” voices from “normal” people who will be with a glorious God. And when all our voices come together, it will be glorious.
Kazoos and all.
Tohru Inoue serves with SIM Kenya. This piece was first published on https://tohruinoue.substack.com/p/heavens-music-played-through-a-kazoo?r=2vluod&utm_medium=ios
