Sermon for Proper 25 (Year C, 2025)

Sermon for Proper 25 (Year C, 2025)

Jeremiah 14:7-10,19-22

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon for Proper 25C

Leading up to our reading from Luke, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem,

where many of Luke’s central themes come into focus. He teaches about being

ready for the coming Kingdom of God (Luke 17:20–37), the cost of discipleship

(Luke 14:25–33), God’s concern for the humble and the outcast (Luke 14:7–14),

and the dangers of pride and hypocrisy. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax

collector fits naturally within this larger theme that “the last will be first, and the

first will be last” (Luke 13:30). God justifies the humble, not the self-righteous.

Jesus tells this parable in response to some Pharisees “who trusted in

themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (Luke

18:9). The Pharisee goes up to the Temple and, in effect, tells God that he is not

like other people. While the Law required fasting only once a year (Leviticus

16:29–31), he boasts of fasting twice a week. While the tithe demanded a tenth of

one’s produce or livestock (Deuteronomy 14:22–23), he tithes everything. He

thanks God that he is not like this tax collector — a man working for Rome, the

occupying power, seen as corrupt, impure, and traitorous. His listeners would have

agreed so far: this Pharisee seems to be doing religion “right.” But the tax collector

stands at a distance, will not lift his eyes, and simply prays, “God, be merciful to

me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). And Jesus delivers the reversal that defines his

Kingdom: “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the

other” (Luke 18:14).

The Pharisees, like their Judean ancestors in the time of Jeremiah, trusted

that outward observance would secure God's favor. Up until Jeremiah 14, God

accuses Judah of breaking the covenant through idolatry and social injustice,

calling out their hypocritical worship — trusting that ritual would preserve them

while neglecting justice (Jeremiah 7:1–11). By Jeremiah 14:7, the people finally

confess, “Although our iniquities testify against us, act, O Lord, for your name’s

sake; our apostasies indeed are many, and we have sinned against you.” But the

Lord replies that He “does not accept them” and will “remember their iniquity and

punish their sins” (Jeremiah 14:10). Like the Pharisees, they clung to a religious

system that promised security if one simply performed it correctly — a status quo

of self-assured righteousness that inevitably looked down on those who could not

keep up.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault helps us see how such systems

function. He taught that the power which compels conformity to certain standards

of righteousness is not merely coercive but formative — it shapes us through the

discourses and disciplines that define what counts as truth, virtue, and normality

(Discipline and Punish, 1975; The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 1976). Power, he

argued, always generates its own margins: those who cannot or will not conform,

who bear the strain of a system’s demand for purity.

Using Foucault’s vocabulary, the tax collector is a subject — one who is

both governed and self-governing, produced by authority and defined as deviant

by the authority that sustains moral order. For the Pharisees, what mattered was

not his particular sins, but his position as tax collector in relation to power. His

humanity was reduced to his function, his personhood objectified by his role.

Like the ancient tax collector, we too live in systems that measure, manage,

and reduce us in terms of productivity, reputation, compliance, and worth. In

Jesus’ time, as in ours, some people did not have the physical strength to fast twice

a week; others were forced to fast for lack of food. For some, a tenth of their

income might be someone's entire livelihood. Each of us, in one way or another,

participates in systems that prize performance over mercy filling forms, meeting

targets, curating images, translating our worth into metrics. And that is the human

condition revealed in this text: we take God’s truth and intention for us and turn

them into instruments of control: our truth, our standard, our measure for others.

The Pharisee believed that by exceeding the law’s demands he could justify

himself before God; in doing so, he estranged himself from his neighbor and,

ultimately, from God.

But the Good News is that God’s Kingdom is not restrained or defined by

our systems of righteousness. God’s mercy, not our merit, makes us right with

God. God exalts the humble who depend on grace and humbles the proud who

trust in themselves (Luke 18:14). God’s Kingdom breaks into the very places and

people we least expect — those we may not agree with, or even despise.

Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, we see tax collectors responding to John the

Baptist’s call to prepare for the Kingdom:

“Teacher, what should we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than

the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what

should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by

threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.” (Luke

3:12–14)Next Sunday we will meet Zacchaeus, another tax collector, who after

encountering Jesus declares, “Half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the

poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as

much.” Jesus responds, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:8–9).

In neither case does Jesus command them to change their profession, but He

commends their changed hearts. So when the tax collector in the Temple beats his

breast and prays, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” he speaks for all of us. His

prayer is the moment when a self, formed by an unsustainable system of worth,

finally tells the truth about itself — and, in that truth, discovers grace. He names

the exhaustion of living by metrics and opens himself to the mercy no system can

give. The point is not his profession, but his humility. His repentance stands in

contrast to the Pharisee’s self-sufficiency.

Lately, well for much of this year — I’ve been thinking and praying over

vocations and positions that seem to stand against Christ’s coming Kingdom. In

preparing this sermon, I’ve had to confront my own contempt for certain others

that I read about in the headlines. It is easy to erase the humanity of those whose

very role appears to erase the humanity of others. And it turns out that I can do that

exceptionally well. But the impossible, uncomfortable truth of the Gospel is this: it

is not my judgment that changes hearts, but the call of Jesus Christ — the One

who still seeks those on the margins, those who cannot live up to our impossible

standards, and perhaps those whom I myself have helped to exclude. It's actually

been pretty humbling to hold in memory that God's potential in me isn't just

limited to me and those like me, but those who are the outsiders in my own

system of self-righteousness. And so, this parable leaves us where the tax collector

stands — empty-handed before God, yet open to mercy. The posture of the

justified is not triumph but surrender, not certainty but trust. When we confess,

“God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” we step out of the systems that measure and

divide and into the Kingdom that heals and restores. Here, our worth is not earned

but received. Here, our neighbors are not competitors in righteousness but

companions in grace. And here, in the quiet honesty of repentance, God meets us

not to condemn, but to lift us up. May we go home, like that tax collector, justified

by mercy, and ready to see others and ourselves through the eyes of Christ.