We All Fall Down--Ash Wednesday

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).

We all fall down.  And Jesus Christ gets us back up.  Amen.