The Illinois Lottery has rewritten the words to “Joy to the World.” In case we were growing tired of Isaac Watts’ words from 1719 the lottery’s marketing department substituted the man who shampooed your carpets for Christ and the lady who constructed your cat tower for God. Heaven and nature no long sing, but be joyful that your neighbor rocks it softly after ten.

John Kass wrote about this in Thursday’s Chicago Tribune. Kass is not known for his sentimentality, but he called a representative of the lottery and asked, “Isn’t this song about Christ?” The person answered, “That is not the connection we were going for. . . . It’s about bringing joy into peoples’ lives. . . . Buying a lottery ticket is a way to thank someone for the little things that they did throughout the year. . . . The words were changed because we did not want people to be offended.”

Kass concludes, “That must be why the lottery used a deeply religious song and made a joke out of it to sell tickets. So they wouldn’t offend. What joy.”

Of course, the Illinois Lottery has been offensive for decades, no matter what the season. Follow the money. Where does the lottery target its advertising? To the poorest neighborhoods of the city and the most poverty-stricken areas of the state. Where are the most lottery tickets sold? In zip codes where people have the least money to lose. Yes, what joy. What an offense.

The lottery was supposed to pay for our public education, remember. Now, here comes video poker to fill our potholes. “”What songs will they use?” Kass wonders. “How about ‘Silent Night’ or ‘Ave Maria’?”

Well, maybe we should not be so hard on the Illinois Lottery. John the Baptist was offensive, too. “You brood of vipers!” John starts his sermon. Imagine the lottery using that one. They could set that to “The First Noel” and it still would not “sing.” But, John is preparing the way for real joy, for genuine meaning in life. He is saying, “There is one coming after me who will change your lives. All that we have prophesied over the centuries is now coming true, so get ready.”

It is like the letter to God in Stuart Hemple’s collection of the same name where a child writes, “Are you real? Some people don’t believe it. If you are, you’d better do something quick.” Well, John, who stands at the end of a long line of splendor of what we know as the Old Testament prophets, is saying to all those who have followed him out to the banks of the Jordan River, “Quick, here he comes!”

The title of today’s sermon is taken from the title of a book, Die Mitte Der Zeit, The Middle of Time, written by the 20th Century biblical scholar, Hans Conzelmann. He places Jesus in the middle of time in a Christian chronology. What goes before is the era of prophets calling for repentance and purification, which John the Baptist represents. What comes after is the time of the Church, the early communities of Christians to whom the Gospel of Luke is addressed. In the middle is the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus whom we call the Christ, the Messiah.

Of course, that is where our beliefs differ from those of our Jewish friends and family members. Is Jesus of Nazareth the messiah portrayed by the prophets, or not? As the story goes, someone asks the rabbi what would he say if he met the messiah today. He replied, “I’d say, ‘Is this your first time or have you been here before?’”

We Christians reshuffled the deck when we appropriated the Hebrew scripture and renamed it “The Old Testament.” In our version, the collection opens with the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, and then we have the history books and the writings, like Psalms, Job, and Proverbs. Finally, we place the prophets at the end so that all that they envision is fulfilled in our eyes by Jesus Christ.

In the Hebrew scripture itself, the Tanakah, there are the five Books of Moses, then the prophets, after which come the history books and the writings. The Jewish order of things suggests that that toward which the prophets are pointing either is fulfilled or not within the history of Israel itself. So, in our reading from Zephaniah today, “Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies,” all of that relates to the immediate history of the Jewish people, not to some future salvation in a messiah yet to come.

So, when we place Jesus in the middle of time, we must know what we are doing. We are making a confession of faith and shaping the Bible to reflect our belief. We are saying that in him we find true joy, in him we find genuine meaning, and it’s his lead that we will follow both as the Church and as individual believers. That is what we do when we gather hereto worship: we place Jesus in the center of our lives and vow to follow him.

That is a lot of work, putting Jesus at the center of our lives. And that is why true faithfulness will always be a “minority position.” There was another article in this week’s papers about how on Sunday mornings the church pews are empty and the restaurants serving brunch are packed. Of course, brunch will be more fun than church. And the food better. The chairs more comfortable. And the chit-chat more sociable. Worship will never be as filling as a three-egg omelet, but it just might be more fulfilling.

At brunch they ask, “Bacon or sausage?” At church we ask, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” At brunch they ask, “What will fill you stomachs?” At church we ask, “What will fill your souls after you have eaten what the buffet table has to offer?” Where is the joy that lasts?

John the Baptist is not serving brunch in the wilderness. Can you imagine your waiter coming up to your table and saying, “You brood of vipers, my name is Daniel. I’ll be serving you today. Can I start you with a beverage?” John is not offering immediate, but only momentary, satisfaction. He is saying, “There is one coming after me who is so much greater than I that I am not worthy even to tie his sandals for him. I baptize with the cleansing water of baptism, but he will baptize with spirit and fire. So, prepare yourselves for the radical one who is on his way, the radical one, the one who will go to the root of life, to its core meaning. What you can do now is prepare yourselves.” Remember the song before the Illinois Lottery savaged it, “Let every heart prepare him room”? Prepare room for the Lord.

“What shall we do?” the people ask. And here John gets very simple, and I think goes rather easy on us. These are not earthshaking changes, not yet. Jesus will challenge us to the core of our being, but to prepare

“Those of you who have two coats and another person has none, give him one of yours. And if you have enough food, give the hungry one something to eat.” Share. Something so simple. Generosity toward others cleans out the debris of possessiveness from our hearts.

“You who are tax collectors, be honest.” He does not ask them to get out of the tax collecting business. Someone has to do it. This church sits here in the center of the governmental district . . . City Hall across the street, the Cook County offices next door, the State of Illinois Building down the street, tax collectors all around, and government workers who do the tough job of ordering our common life. Be honest.

“Soldiers of the Roman occupying army, no intimidation, no threats, no extortions, no raping, no murdering. If you are here to bring stability then do nothing that unsettles the fragile peace.” Notice that John does not ask them to melt down their swords into plows; the prophets before him pleaded for that and Jesus coming after him will insist that all of us who bear his name be peacemakers in a very real sense. But for now, do not exploit power for your own gain.

Be generous. Be honest. Be kind. Maybe the Illinois Lottery can set that to music, but it would undermine its business and expose it for the offense that it is. And maybe there are people who naturally are generous and honest and kind, in which case bypass the church and go directly to brunch.

But there are some of us who need help in living that way. “Sinners,” we call ourselves. “Brood of vipers!” . . . a bit tough, but then John had a way of getting peoples’ attention. It is not easy being generous in a world of economic uncertainty. It is not easy being honest in a world where everyone seems to be out to trick you. It is not easy being kind in a world of real threat.

But real joy . . . not the scratch-off-the-card kind or the Eggs Benedict kind, but the kind that comes from discovering how to live a fully-engaged life in this world, is found, we Christians are prone to say, by focusing our attention on the middle of time, on the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. There we discover true meaning, and it is that for which every heart now must prepare him room. Amen.