Sermon — March 9, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
In March of 1522 in the Swiss city of Zurich, a priest named Ulrich Zwingli participated in an event that led to outrage and condemnation. Personally, I think there was a missed opportunity for a great Hollywood film to be made on the 500th anniversary, because the name alone is made for the silver screen. The events of that Lent, 503 years ago, became known to history as The Affair of the Sausages.
It was just five years after Martin Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. The Protestant Reformation was in its earliest days. But one thing was clear: more and more Christians, clergy and laypeople alike, were beginning to question the commandments of the church. And this was particularly true for the Church’s teachings on things like fasting during Lent. The Church had developed an intricate system of rules for which foods could be eaten when, and which could not. But this seemed to have little to do with the good news. Jesus and his disciples were accused of not fasting enough, in fact, and the Apostle Paul made compelling arguments that Christians had been freed from these kinds of legalistic practices by God: “by grace [they had] been saved through faith, and not by works of the law.” (Eph. 2:8)
And so one night in 1522, Zwingli was invited to the home of a local printer whose workers had been laboring day and night to publish a new edition of the Epistles of Saint Paul, and they shared a meal during which, despite the Lenten ban on the consumption of meat, they ate a few slices of smoked sausage.
The public was outraged. The printer who hosted the meal was arrested. But Zwingli took a public stand. Fasting or not fasting, he argued, was a matter of individual conscience, not something that the Church could demand. Fasting could not save a Christian’s soul; by grace they had been saved, through faith. The Bishop was furious. But Zwingli’s view convinced his fellow-citizens, and he went on to lead the Reformation in Switzerland, at least until his death.
Now, the Episcopal Church is a Protestant church. But we’ve also always occupied a kind of middle way between the most outspoken Protestants and the Catholic tradition. And so at Coffee Hour this week, you might hear people chat about whether they’re “giving something up” during Lent or “taking something on” or simply going about their lives as usual. So I thought it might be interesting today, as we begin this season of Lent, to try to draw this all together; to ask whether there’s a way to understand the spiritual benefits of adopting a Lenten discipline while still embracing the freedom Zwingli found, five hundred years ago, in the good news that he was saved by the grace of God, and not by his own hard work; the freedom to eat a sausage, even during Lent.
The whole practice of a Lenten fast starts with our Gospel story today, in which Jesus fasts for a season of forty days. No ordinary person can go without food for so long, of course, but the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have always had certain regulations around eating and fasting during these forty days. And many people choose to fast from a particular thing for the duration of the season. So, for example, I’ve heard of people here fasting from chocolate, coffee, alcohol, Amazon.com, and the reading of novels, among other things.
There’s an important subtlety here. There’s a difference between giving up something you think is bad, and something you think is good. You can give up something that’s bad, a habit or a vice, any time, and Lent offers a great structure to start. But to fast is to give up something good, temporarily, and plan to take it up again at Easter. So the medieval practice of giving up meat during Lent wasn’t about ethical vegetarianism; they didn’t give up meat because they thought it was bad, but because it was good, and hard to give up. And the same is true if you fast from chocolate, or coffee today.
So why would you do that? Here’s the thing: The goal is to give something up where the stakes are low; where it doesn’t matter if you cheat, because the thing you’ve given up is fine on its own; but that’s enticing enough that it can teach you something about how you respond to the cycle of temptation, failure, and grace. So I want to say a few words about temptation, and failure, and grace.
Jesus has been fasting for forty days and he’s “famished.” (Luke 4:2) And now, the temptations begin to come. The devil entices him—You’re the Son of God… Why don’t you just turn this hard stone into nice, soft bread? The devil shows him the kingdoms of the world: I’m a pretty well-connected guy; just, worship me, and I’ll give you however much political power you please. (Hm.) And the devil takes him up to the top of the Temple—Aren’t you always going on about being the Beloved Son of God? Jump off! God won’t let anything bad happen to you.
Jesus easily resists. But temptation is harder for us. It doesn’t appear with a pitchfork and horns. It doesn’t all come at the end of forty days. Temptation appears in different times and in different ways. And one of the purposes of fasting during Lent is to understand how the dynamics of temptation work out for you. When does that little voice appear that says “Oh, surely it’s not that big of a deal…” Is it when you’re hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? With a certain group of friends, or a certain family member? When you experience the temptation to break your Lenten fast, you can ask the usual questions—the who/what/where/when/why of its appearance, and then the how, as in, How do you resist it? Jesus quotes repeatedly from the Psalms, and that works for him. What’s going to work for you?
And what is it like when it doesn’t work? Failure isn’t a part of the story of the temptation of Christ, but none of us is Christ. We fail. So what’s that feel like for you? What’s it like to try to abstain from Amazon for six weeks and finding your finger inexorably drawn to the orange button tempting you to “Buy Now.” Do you feel the heat of shame when you fail? Do you immediately start to rationalize it to yourself? If you find that you succeed easily in a forty-day fast—if you never give in, if you never fail—then maybe you should try something harder next time, because failing at Lent is a really important part.
Failure is important because it unlocks the third and most important step: grace. What do you do after things go off the rails? How do you get back on the horse? How do you admit that you’ve failed, and start again—not by rationalizing it or by hiding it in shame, but by accepting that you’ve messed up, and you are loved, and you can go on, nevertheless? Jesus raises the bar of perfection. Jesus makes resisting temptation look easy. But Paul lowers the bar completely to the floor. Salvation doesn’t depend on your perfect Lenten fast. Salvation doesn’t depend on your good deeds. It’s simple, for Paul: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)
This is the kind of good news that led to the Affair of the Sausages. Those Swiss workers, after all, had just finished printing an edition of the Epistles of Paul. And what they had found in those letters, again and again, was the message of God’s grace. They discovered that they didn’t need the Church’s whole system of penance and indulgence, fasting and good works. Paul had set the bar so low that all they needed was to put their trust in what God had already done for them, because “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13)
Even as imperfect, limited human beings, they would be forgiven and loved and saved by God, free of charge. And so are you. And so that’s the third thing about which Lent invites you to reflect: What does it feel like to be forgiven, and accepted, even when you fail?
Life is full of temptations, small and large, but they exist on a sliding scale. If you fast from social media during Lent, and find yourself logging in to scroll—that’s okay! The point is to learn how to face the bigger temptations in your life, the ones that really do matter. The temptation to gossip about the secret of a friend. The temptation to violate the trust of someone we love. The temptation to let ourselves be overwhelmed with apathy in the face of a suffering world. Temptation is a fact of human life. But Lent is a chance to play, a chance to train, a chance to experiment, to learn about how temptation works for us. To learn how failure feels for us. To practice accepting the grace that comes, inevitably, even after our worst mistakes, freeing us from the fear and the shame of being imperfect people, for as “the scripture says, ‘No one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.’” (Romans 10:11)