Ulrich Zwingli and The Sausage

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight O God, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

Today is a great day in the calendar of the Christian Church. It is the nearest Sunday to the Feast of the Ascension last Thursday, the first Sunday after the Ascension, when, as we heard in our reading from Acts, we remember the resurrected Christ, Ascending to Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father – there to rule heaven and earth with a more immediate power than on earth. For from heaven, we see how much more abundantly Christ poured out his Spirit, at Pentecost and after; after ascending to the Father, we see how much more wonderfully Christ advanced his Kingdom, and how much greater power he displayed in helping his people. Carried up into heaven, he withdrew his bodily presence from our sight; but he hasn’t stopped being present with us believers who are still on our earthly pilgrimage. For it is by his ascension that Jesus fulfils what he had promised: that he would be with us even to the end of the world. As his body was raised up above all the heavens, so his power and energy were dispersed and spread beyond all the bounds of heaven and earth, in the Holy Spirit, to a greater extent that when his body was constrained to earth.

That is why the Ascension is one of the 4 great feasts of the Christian year – along with Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. And so it is a joy to celebrate this great feast day, here at St Mary Magdalene’s, by gathering in praise and thanksgiving in church, and then to feast, with our great tradition of eating of the sausage. Now you may not realise it, but the regular feast of Sausage Sunday as it has come to be known, is an inherently and fundamentally Anglican way of being a Christian. When you eat a sausage on Sausage Sunday, you are declaring to the world, I am Church of England – here I stand, I can do no other.

And I will tell you for why. The humble sausage has had a noble part in the history of the Protestant Reformation. There were 4 great Reformers of the Reformation. John Calvin. Our own Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, the greatest of them all.There was Martin Luther, who started the Reformation. And, finally, there was like the fourth Beatle, Ulrich Zwingli, who at any rate wins the prize for the best name.

But what made Ulrich Zwingli famous, and is of almost equal importance to Martin Luther’s 95 theses, was Ulrich Zwingli’s part in The Great Sausage Controversy of 1522.

Let me set the scene: it is March, and it is no doubt a warm and pleasant evening in Zurich. The setting sun is glittering deep and orange on the waters of Lake Zurich. The evening birds are twittering, but settling down for the end of the day. And 12 men at a printer’s have been working flat-out all day preparing their new edition of St Paul’s letters. And so the print-owner serves them some refreshing and much needed smoked sausage. Nothing controversial in that, you may think. Nut you would think wrong. For it is Lent in oppressive Catholic Europe, and the Roman Catholic Church says that the eating of sausages is verboten during Lent. An outcry ensures; the authorities promptly arrest the printer for breaking the fasting laws. Our friend Ulrich Zwingli was at the sausage supper and defended the printers in a famous sermon. In it he denounced the Roman Catholic Church for holding to human tradition over the commandments of God. How you keep Lent is up to your own individual conscience – and depends on your own personal relationship with God. It is not for the Church to tell you how to live your Lent, when the New Testament doesn’t prohibit eating meat in Lent. “In a word,” Zwingli said, “if you will fast, do so; if you do not wish to eat meat, eat it not; but leave Christians a free choice in the matter.” It was this sausage sermon, if you will, that ignited the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland.

So you see how when we eat the sausage, we are continuing that great Protestant memory of standing up to spiritual corruption and arrogance in the Church.

And I would go further. For we are not a puritan church. We still celebrate church festivals like Christmas, we still celebrate the lives of saints as examples of how we may follow Christ. The puritans thought we should do away with such things.

In a classic Church of England way, here at St Mary Magdalene’s we have rejected the errors of Puritanism, and we reject the doctrinal errors of the Roman Catholic Church.

We celebrate feast days and saints, and we are proud to feast by the eating of sausages, as good Anglicans. Sausage Sunday is, as it were, the Church of England in a nutshell.

For we eat of the sausage on a great feast day, today the Sunday after the Ascension, and we often feast on a Sunday after Church for no other reason than in celebration of our patroness St Mary Magdalene, to whom we are dedicated for St Mary Magdalene shows us by her life and example how we may follow Christ more closely.

So, remember, although all churches are Christian and part of the body of Christ, and we look with pity and toleration on their errors, yet I would urge you to be joyful that you are Anglican, to rejoice that we the Church of England are the truest expression of God’s church. May we always stay true to God’s calling for us as a church and as a church community welcoming to all. In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

The Rev’d Michael Aylmer,
St Mary Magdalene Enfield,
17/05/2026