God Be Merciful to Me, A Sinner
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, March 22, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Luke, the 18th chapter, verses 9-14.
9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Opening: The Weight of the Words
God, be merciful to me, a sinner. We begin with those seven words. Not a creed, not a doctrine, not a systematic theology. Just a human being at the back of a room, unable to look up, saying: God, be merciful to me, a sinner.
Luke tells us that Jesus told this story to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. That’s the setup. That’s the condition Jesus is diagnosing and it’s worth pausing there, because before we learn anything about the Pharisee or the tax collector, we’re shown for whom this parable is told. It’s not for the people already on their knees. It’s for those of us who have, perhaps without meaning to, begun to mistake our proximity to righteousness for righteousness itself.
The Two Prayers
We need to recall what these identities were, Pharisee and tax collector, because that’s the only way Jesus talks about them. Pharisees were members of a distinct sect of pious Jews and while they were religiously conservative, they tended to be relatively younger men who were interested in new revelations of God’s work in the world. The fact that the Gospels so often portray them as questioning Jesus is not necessarily because they were trying to trip him up or get him in trouble, but because they were genuinely curious.
Tax collecting in Roman Palestine and other parts of the Roman Empire was a lucrative position, but one that was both dangerous and had far reaching social implications for the tax collectors. Tax collectors were recruited from the local population and granted their appointments because they knew the local community and lived in that community. If that wasn’t bad enough, tax collectors were paid based on the difference of their imperial quota and the actual tax they collected. So, if your household owed the empire 10 pieces of silver, tax collectors would charge you 12 pieces of silver of which they would ultimately keep two pieces. There was nothing in it for them to collect only the tax you owed. So, they became wealthy as they also became social pariahs.
Getting back to the temple, technically, what the Pharisee prays is not wrong. He thanks God and doesn’t lie about his own life. He fasts. He tithes. His righteousness in practice, such that he goes through the motions of religious devotion, is not in question. He’s a man who has done everything right and would be the envy of any religious group.
But Jesus says he went home empty. And the tax collector, a man who worked for an occupying imperial regime, who extorted his own neighbors to line his pockets and Rome’s coffers, this man went home justified. This man went home with something the Pharisee couldn’t buy with ten years of twice-weekly fasting.
The Pharisee’s prayer is a list of achievements addressed, more or less, to himself. He’s not really talking to God. He’s narrating his own virtue to an audience of one. The prayer curls inward. It measures. It compares. It ranks. God is invoked, but God is not actually present in the Pharisee’s prayer. There’s no need for God, because the Pharisee has handled things rather well without divine assistance.
The tax collector’s prayer, however, is a simple confession and declaration of need. It is entirely oriented outward toward God, toward mercy, and toward a reality the man cannot manufacture on his own. The prayer is an open hand. And God fills open hands.
The Practice of Confession: Gift and Wound
This parable has helped to shape Christian penitential practice for two millennia. Out of it and other texts, Christianity has built entire traditions of penance, of confession, of what the church calls the prayer of humble access. And we need to hold something in tension here. These practices have been, for many people, genuinely transformative. And for many others, they have been sites of profound trauma.
On one side of the tension: there is something deeply human about the practice of naming what we’ve done, what we’ve failed to do, and what has been done on our behalf whether we wanted it to happen or not. There is a certain release in saying the true thing out loud. There is freedom in not having to maintain the performance of righteousness. Confession, when it is functioning as it was meant to, is not about self-flagellation, it’s about honesty. It’s about dropping the pretense and being seen. It’s about discovering that you are still held by your friends, your family, and your community.
The best Christian practices of confession carry this spirit. They’re not about accumulating guilt; they are about releasing it. They don’t demand that you prove your worthiness before God will receive you. They insist that God receives you precisely because you cannot prove your worthiness. That is the tax collector’s testimony. That is the logic of grace.
But penitential practices have been made into something less about grace and more about shame. The church and people claiming to represent the church have weaponized these practices for their own gain. Many of us or those we love have sat in church settings where confession was used not to liberate but to control. Where the message, spoken or unspoken, was that we were fundamentally broken. We were told that we must keep saying so, keep performing our brokenness, keep returning to the altar, keep proving to the institution and to God that we know our place.
We weren’t offered forgiveness unless we first changed something about ourselves and even then, we were held up as special types of sinners, often while the very leaders condemning our “sins” did far worse behind closed doors and were still supported by other leaders. LGBTQIA+ people, women, people struggling with addiction, survivors of abuse, and other people whose bodies or identities were labeled sinful know this use of penance far too well, but so do people who made mistakes which put them at odds with communities who should have supported them.
There’s a version of the Pharisee’s prayer that says all the right penitent words, but it uses those words to reinforce a hierarchy and to keep certain people perpetually confessing, perpetually under the control of the leaders. It’s confession as domination. And Jesus has nothing to say in favor of it.
The tax collector’s prayer is not humiliation. It’s humility. Humiliation is something done to you, often by systems and institutions with power over you. Humility is something you arrive at, a true reckoning with your own limits, your own need, your own entanglement in the messiness of being human. The tax collector was not told he was a sinner. He knew it and he brought that knowledge to God without a mediator demanding his performance.
We hold this tension honestly: some penitential practices bear fruit, while other penitential practices cause trauma, and sometimes the same practice, in different hands, does both. The question is not whether we will have practices of reckoning—we will, we must, it’s part of what it means to be human and spiritual—but whether those practices are oriented toward liberation or toward control.
A Collective Reckoning: The Sin We Inherit and Extend
Now I want to take the tax collector’s posture, spiritually and physically, and apply it towards a reality beyond individual moral failure. Because one of the ways the church has historically misused the language of sin is to keep it entirely personal, between you and God, in a way that conveniently leaves structural evil untouched.
The tax collector’s sin was not only his. He was embedded in a system. He didn’t invent Roman imperial taxation. He was a local employee of an occupying regime that extracted wealth from the poor and the colonized and redistributed it upward. His individual sin was inseparable from a systemic sin. And when he beat his chest and said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” he was not just naming his private choices. He was naming his complicity in something larger than himself.
I want to invite my fellow white Christians into the same posture.
Racism in America is not only a matter of individual prejudice. It’s a structure and a system with a history.
That history is not over.
The racial wealth gap in this country is a direct inheritance of chattel slavery, of Black Codes and Jim Crow, of convict leasing, of redlining, of the deliberate exclusion of Black Americans from the New Deal’s benefits, of GI Bill provisions that built the white middle class while excluding Black soldiers from many of the same benefits even when they fought with distinction in the same war. These are not ancient grievances. They are present realities, because wealth compounds and deprivation compounds, and we are living in the compounded interest of centuries.
When we benefit from systems built on that foundation, when we live in neighborhoods whose property values were inflated by exclusion, when we inherit wealth that was accumulated in part because others were excluded from accumulating it, when we move through institutions that were designed for our access, we are, whether we chose it or not, the tax collector. We are inside the system. We are participants in something we didn’t invent or have any desire to establish, but from which we continue to benefit and can never entirely escape.
This is what theologians mean when they speak of original sin as social and structural, not some stain on an individual soul, but the web of broken relations into which we are all born, which shapes us long before we are able to consent. We inherit it. And then, if we’re not deliberate, we extend it.
The Pharisee’s response to this, if we map it onto white American Christianity, is both familiar and catastrophic: “God, I thank you that I’m not like those people. I’m not a racist. I don’t say those words. I didn’t own slaves and neither did my ancestors. I have Black friends. I always vote the right way and for the right people.”
And perhaps all of that is true. But if while saying those things, we’re doing nothing to dismantle racist structures and if we’re more committed to our own comfort than to our neighbors’ justice, then that prayer curls inward, and we go home empty.
The tax collector’s response, which was never meant as a performance or some other expression of performative guilt, is to say: I am inside this. I have benefited from it. My family’s history is tangled up in it. And God, I need something bigger than my own virtue to get me through. I need transformation, not just good intentions. I need a community committed to repentance and to repair.
Repair is the word I want to land on. Not guilt as a destination. Not shame as a spiritual practice. But repair. The Hebrew concept of teshuvah, return and turning, implies not only a change of heart but a change of direction. You turn around and walk a different way. Teshuvah is connected to another Hebrew concept: tikkun olam [te-koon olam] or repairing the world.
When the harm has been material, when whole communities have been systematically stripped of wealth, health, housing, safety, and power, turning around means working to give back what was taken. It means supporting reparative policies. It means showing up in proximity and in solidarity. It means asking, “What does justice require of me?” rather than “What is the minimum I can do and still feel like a good person?” It means repairing the world.
No person or congregation is asked to carry the weight of American history alone. But we are asked to carry our part of it honestly. We’re asked to do it in community, with one another, and in deep partnership with the communities most harmed by these systems.
Justified, Not Perfected
In closing, we need to pay close attention to what Jesus says and does not say about the tax collector. Jesus doesn’t say the tax collector was righteous. Jesus says he was justified. There’s a difference. Righteous means you have arrived. Justified means you have been received, as you are, where you are, and something new has begun.
The tax collector walked home the same person he was. He still had accounts to settle, relationships to repair, a system to reckon with. But something had shifted. He had been seen, and he had been received, and that reception is the beginning of everything. You can’t change what you will not first acknowledge. You can’t be healed in a wound you insist on hiding.
The mercy of God is not a reward for getting your confession right. It’s not a prize given to those who perform humility convincingly. It’s the gravity of the universe, the deepest current of reality, always already rushing toward the one who turns and opens their hands.
And here is the truth I want you to leave carrying: the prayer that goes home justified is not the prayer that has it together. It’s the prayer that knows it does not. It’s the prayer that has stopped comparing. It is the prayer that has let go of the need to be right and has simply asked to be received with mercy, and sent out to practice it.
We are called to pray that prayer. Not once, not in a single moment of crisis, but as a way of being in the world. To keep our hands open. To keep our hearts honest. To keep confessing, not because we are broken and must remain so, but because we are in process, and honesty is the road, and mercy is what lines it on every side.
God, be merciful to me, a sinner. God, be merciful to us. God, be merciful to the systems we swim in. And God show us how to be mercy for one another.
Amen.