We
All Fall Down
Ash
Wednesday
2
Corinthians 5:20ff.
“Ring around the
rosy, a pocket full of posies.
Ashes, ashes—we all
fall down!”
That little children’s song
produces great controversy. Some scholars
say it’s a playful code for a very dark reality. They suggest that the song describes the
Black Plague in the Middle Ages.
The rings are the horrible rashes
the plague produced. Bodies and homes of
the dead were burned to remove the threat.
European civilization nearly collapsed in the chaos of the pandemic.
Others say this is all nothing
but an urban legend. The song is part of
an innocent children’s game. Nothing
more sinister should be imagined.
I don’t care one way or the
other. But “Ring Around the Rosy” feels
to me like something deeper than a game.
We dance through our lives looking for happiness and fleeing from
sorrow. Yet, the ashes are inevitable. Indeed, we are dust—and to dust we shall
return.
Ash Wednesday worship is not
going to make anyone’s list of “Top Ten Fun Things to Do.” I think, however, it is the most honest day
of the church year. We ARE dust, and to
dust we shall return. We ARE in bondage
to sin and cannot free ourselves. We all
HAVE sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
You can do the denial dance for a lifetime. But we all fall down in the end.
You and I wear the ashes because
we will not embrace the dance of denial.
But those ashes are shaped as a cross.
They have that shape because they are not the last word.
In the space the ashes occupy,
there is a deeper cross. Right in that
spot, someone marked you. They said,
“Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the
cross of Christ forever.” Ashes,
ashes—we all fall down! But we also get
up to live a new life.
It is no accident that we move
from ashes to the Lord’s Table. We all
fall, but we get back up. We do that
because Jesus Christ has done it first.
Paul reminds us of this in Second Corinthians five, verse
twenty-one.
“For our sake God made him to be son who knew no sin, so that in him we
might become the righteousness of God.”
Jesus Christ fell down to death
for you and me. He gets us to give us
new life here and now.
The ashes are so thick around us
these days. They remind us of our
mortality. They remind us that we won’t
live forever. They remind us that we
can’t control everything.
We are covered with the dust and
ashes of grief and pain. We are so
lonely. A loved one has died. An important anniversary has come and
gone. Our bodies no longer work as
they’re supposed to. A chronic illness
just won’t get better. A relationship
refuses to be healed. Perhaps we are
facing our own death. A child heads off
in a direction that panics us. A
marriage comes apart. Things aren’t
turning out like we planned.
We all fall down. And Jesus Christ gets us back up.
We trudge through the dust and
ashes of this world. War rages near and
far. People are afraid. Power is more important than peace. Values are whatever serves the folks who are
in charge. Truth is in the eye of the
beholder. Love and sex are commodities
best used to sell cars and beer.
We all fall down. And Jesus Christ gets us back up.
And when we get up, he uses us to
raise up others. We all fall down. And Jesus Christ gets us back up. The
wonderful Lutheran composer, John Ylvisaker, wrote it well: God has made a new beginning from the ashes
of our past; In the losing and the winning we hold fast.” (Ylvisaker, “We
are Baptized in Christ Jesus).
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