There was a fat, white, pasty‑looking
and extremely Anglo Catholic dean of my diocese when I was a child. Whenever my mother cooked sausages for us she
would say, as she put them into the pan all pale, pink, soft and pasty looking,
"Look, here's Dean So and So before he heads off to the seaside on
holiday." When they were fat,
brown, firm, and crispy and ready to be eaten, she would say, "Look, here
is Dean So and So back from his holiday by the sea." As children we thought this an excellent
joke. I am still childish enough to think it rather funny.
When I was at theological college we
were served huge and fearsome sausages on Saturday nights. They were called "Boerwors",
farm sausages, a South African Dutch sausage.
They were long, black, spicy brutes, and unlike other sausages contained
no sawdust, just a generous proportion of large gristle granules to dilute the
coarse particles of real meat.
They used to make us burp. One Saturday night I took one of these
sausages from the dining room and pinned it onto the door of a student who was
coming in late that night. I hoped that
it would give him a fright hanging there black and comatose to greet him in the
dark and that it would remind him of what he had missed.
He was not at all impressed. All he did was pull it off the door and throw
it out of the window on to the roof of the veranda below. It stayed there for months and proved to be a
very informative sausage. It sent out a
slow trickle of grease on hot days, went black in sunshine and white in the
rain. We all became fascinated by
it. You could tell the weather from
it. We were sorry when a crow spied it,
ate it and burped and gurgled over it for hours in a nearby tree.
Sausages have played not a small
role in the life of every parish I have been Rector of. Every first Sunday of
the month a proportion of our congregation heads off for a barbecue somewhere
in the district. We walk or swim, drink
local wine and devour local sausages.
In both of the country parishes I have been Rector of in
I have always loved good sausages,
except for a short time when I was visiting a butcher regularly in
hospital. He told me of some of the
indescribably nasty things that he put into his sausages. It put me off them for a while, but not for
long. They are far too tasty to leave
alone for any length of time, especially crisp‑cooked pork sausages. Sausage, egg and chips were a good cheap
staple meal when I was a poverty stricken teacher in
Sausages are a clever way that
butchers have evolved to make unpleasant meat tasty and useful. All sorts of scraps and pieces of meat are
stuffed into sausage skins. They are minced
and spiced and pushed in tight, and the result is usually delicious. There is no meat wasted in a good butcher's
shop. It can all be used. A sausage skin covers a multitude of sins.
The Church is a gracious old lady
who has attracted to herself many metaphors and similes down through the ages
and I would like to suggest a new and tasty if not tasteful one. The Church is like a sausage. I love it.
I have never been able to stay away from it for long. I love its buildings, its music, its
services, its traditions, its parsons, its bishops, its organists, its choirs,
its people, its God. The Church, like
sausages, has played a big part in my life.
And just as sausages are a resourceful expedient that butchers have
evolved to make unpleasant bits of meat
tasty and useful, so is the Church a clever way that God has evolved to make
unpleasant people tasty and useful. As
you find all sorts of scraps and pieces of meat stuffed into sausage skins, so
you find all sorts and types of people in the Church ‑ big, small, good, bad, holy, unholy,
beautiful, ugly, old, young, high church, low church..... every
sort and type, all acceptable and good to be with because God loves them and
because they are all trying to love or follow of believe in God.
There need be no waste in God's
world. Everyone, every scrap and morsel
of a person can be used and made something of in God's