The Lutheran Hour
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"If It Seems Slow, Wait for It"
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Text: Habakkuk 2:3 and Romans 10:9
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A word from the Jewish prophet, Habakkuk: “The vision awaits its appointed time. It hastens to the end; it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come, it will not delay,” (Habakkuk 2:3).
Anyone who has seen the speed of this disease realizes its fearsome power. In your mind, picture a child. She has dark skin and dark hair. You assume she has dark eyes too, but you can’t see her eyes right now because they’re shut tight. She’s lying on a small bed in a one room hut with a thatch roof and a dirt floor. She’s doubled over in pain on her side, groaning with cramps in her gut. And then, she starts throwing up, projectile vomiting, and then diarrhea like you’ve never seen before, internal fluids coming out of both ends. This goes on for hours.
The bacteria that cause cholera are usually ingested from contaminated drinking water. The toxins secreted by the bacteria triggers a rapid outpouring of fluid into the intestine. The body, which is over 60 percent water, is wrung out like a sponge, and the victim dies of dehydration. Drinking water to replace the lost fluids won’t work because the intestine won’t absorb it. So the victim is wrung out. In one day, she loses one-third of her body weight. She goes from 60 pounds to 40 pounds in one day. When cholera first reached the city of Paris in 1831, a doctor there noted that whereas other diseases end in death, this one begins with it. Six worldwide cholera pandemics occurred between 1817 and 1923, killing millions.
In 1906, a treatment for cholera was discovered, intravenous fluid, IV fluid. Putting IV fluid directly into the victim’s veins in many cases will save their life. IV treatment is effective, but prevention proved to be the most effective approach for eradicating cholera. Modern sewage systems prevent the bacteria from getting into the drinking water in the first place. (So remember to say a prayer of thanksgiving every time you send in your sewer bill.) Because in places with undeveloped sewage systems, deadly cholera outbreaks still occur. And to make matters worse, these countries often don’t have access to intravenous treatment. They don’t have the IV needles, the plastic tubing, and the liters and liters of fluid needed to rehydrate the victim. Still today, diarrhea caused by contaminated drinking water is the single greatest killer of children in much of the world.
There is, however, another way to treat the disease. In the 1960s, scientists working with cholera patients discovered that sugar added to water helps the gut absorb the fluid needed to rehydrate the victim. In the country of Bangladesh, during a cholera outbreak, they did a trial on 29 patients, giving them a mixture of sugar, water, and salt. They found that the sugar-water-salt solution worked. It rehydrated the victims. It worked better than IVs. All the patients survived.
By the end of the 20th century, this simple oral rehydration solution would become one of the most important medical advances in modern times, with some estimating upwards of 50 million lives saved because of it. It was a simple, affordable, almost miraculous salvation from an unrelenting, unhesitating disease that begins with death. And you didn’t need to be a trained medic with high-tech equipment to administer it. Any mother could mix up the solution and use it to save her daughter’s life.
And you’d expect a medical miracle like this to go viral, right, to spread almost instantaneously. But it didn’t work like that. Years after this “salvation” was discovered, the solution had stalled. The people who needed it didn’t know about it or didn’t care to use it. Why did this solution stall? Why didn’t it take off? Dr. Atul Gawande explains how in an article titled “Slow Ideas”: “Imagine a child,” he says, “throwing up and pouring out diarrhea like you’ve never seen before. Making her drink some sugar-water-salt solution only seems to make it worse. You’re supposed to be helping her, but it feels like you’re torturing her. But let’s say you do it; you go through with it; you get through the day. But then it’s not a quick fix. You have to keep her drinking the solution even after she feels better for about five days until it all gets out of her system. The solution, in this case, is real but it’s uncomfortable.”
And there are other solutions like this, Dr. Gawande observes, ideas that stall out, that are disbelieved, that are adopted slowly because they contradict conventional wisdom. It’s hard to see how these solutions are helping, and implementing them requires discomfort, some sacrifice, and culture change with no immediate reward. And to make matters worse, we don’t like anything that’s slow. We are infatuated with ideas that spread effortlessly, that go viral in minutes. We want frictionless fixes, plug-and-play answers to our problems. But that’s not the way a slow solution spreads. What we are advocating on this program week after week is like that. It’s a slow solution. It is the solution to our human problem.
And what is our human problem? Think of it like this. You step outside on a beautiful day and you see that a passing car has tossed their fast-food trash on the side of the road in front of your home. “What is wrong with people?” you think to yourself. Later, your friend who’s a teacher in the public school tells you that one of her kindergartners came in the other morning feeling a little queasy and wreaking of his mother’s marijuana smoke. What is wrong with people?” you think to yourself. Later in the day, you get a text from another friend who asks you to pray for his bullied child who is now in intensive care after trying to commit suicide. “What is wrong with people?” you think to yourself.
And we could go on with this case after case, school shootings, wars of aggression, institutional coverups, example after example of human cruelty and misery, entitlement, privilege, indifference. And the more examples we give, the more frustrated or angry we feel, the more hopeless or self-righteous about this human problem. Even with all these high-tech sewer systems and medical centers, people are still sick. When they’re not vomiting insults on each other, they’re spewing excuses, spreading toxins—what is wrong with people? But then, we see that we are people, too. And we can see the same sins in ourselves. We can see that we’re not at all in a place to judge, but rather under judgment, under God’s judgment, just like everyone else.
That’s our human problem as described some 2,000 years ago by a Jewish Christian writer named Paul. Paul summarized our problem as the wrath of God against human evil. You think about it: you and I feel some level of anger, some amount of justified wrath over what’s wrong with people, then how much more the wise and righteous Creator of the universe? And there’s a part of us that knows it’s right for the Creator of this amazing world, not only to be angry at how we’ve messed things up, but also that we want this God to do something about it, to put things right. But putting it right would mean eliminating us, exterminating all of us because we are the problem, all of us, everyone. That’s part of Paul’s message in this letter that he wrote called the letter to the Romans. But it’s only part of the message. It is the diagnosis of the problem.
The other part of the message is God’s chosen solution to the problem. There we learn that God chooses to regard humankind not merely as an object of wrath but, more importantly, like a sick child, a child whom He loves, a helpless child infected with a fearsome disease that begins and ends in death. This is how God chooses to treat us. Not because we deserve to be treated this way, but because this is who God is, this is what God does. God loves. God is, by nature, a loving Father. From eternity before He created the world, God has a Son. And God loves His Son. And the love the Father and the Son share is the Holy Spirit proceeding from them.
And so God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in love perfected the solution—the solution to our human problem. And God demonstrated His love by sending His Son to become a human being, to take the Name Jesus, to take all the wrath onto Himself, to take the toxin of human sin, to die with it on a Roman cross and to rise from the dead in the power of God’s Spirit so that you and I may be saved, to live free from sin, in Him. That’s the solution from God’s side of things. And it is a perfected, complete solution, all ready to go.
But now, the solution needs to be delivered to us. It needs to be administered to us, ingested by us. God’s delivery system to us is His Word. The Word made flesh in Jesus Christ, the spoken word I’m sharing with you right now, the written word of Paul’s letter and other writings of the Bible, the word of promise joined to the water of Baptism, the word of forgiveness and fellowship in the bread and wine, of Holy Communion. God’s Word, Jesus, delivers the solution to our human problem. It might sound complicated, but it’s really very simple.
Paul says it simply like this in the tenth chapter of his letter to the Romans. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you believe, you trust in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” It’s just that simple. Because the way to being right with God is by trusting in your heart. And the way to being saved is by confessing with your mouth. As the Bible says, “All who trust in God will never be put to shame.” Because there is no difference between people, religious or irreligious people, the saintly or the sinner, the same God is Lord overall, giving His solution to all who call upon Him. As it is written, “All who call upon the Name of the Lord will be saved.”
It’s a simple solution. You don’t need a theology degree or some expensive church equipment to receive it or to share it. Just listen to the Word. Call upon Jesus. It’s such a simple solution. Everybody should know about it; everybody should have it. But it doesn’t seem to work like that, does it? This solution is real, but it’s uncomfortable. Letting Jesus have the final say over everything you think, and feel, and do—that is counter to conventional wisdom. So, it’s a slow solution.
How do you spread a slow solution? In the 1980s, a decade after that idea had stalled, Dr. Mushtaq Chowdhury was charged with leading the work in Bangladesh to spread the good news of that miracle oral rehydration solution. Other countries in the region were trying to do the same, to share this good news. Attracted to delivery systems, promising speed and efficiency, they took the high-tech, low-touch route: mass media broadcasts, instructional videos, public service announcements. And those countries failed almost entirely because the solution didn’t fit with what people already thought they knew was true. Word rarely made it into the villages or into the homes, and if it did, it was ignored.
So, Dr. Chowdhury and his team in Bangladesh tried a different method of delivery: one that’s routinely rejected as impractical and inefficient. They went door to door, person by person, face to face. They started by recruiting 14 young women, one male supervisor, and a cook. They counted on the male supervisor to protect the women as they traveled and they counted on the women to protect each other from the supervisor. They went from village to village; they set up camp; they visited every woman in every house, home, and hut. They limited the number of households that they could visit in a given day so that they could take time to talk without being rushed. They kept the message simple. They encouraged mothers to make and administer the solution themselves rather than just telling them or showing them. And then they followed up. They visited again, they answered questions, and the results are stunning.
Over the next ten years, other small teams, mostly women, visited 12.5 million families face to face, virtually every household in Bangladesh. Planted in social spaces, this knowledge spread slowly. But if it seems slow, wait for it. From 1980 to 2005 in Bangladesh, child deaths from diarrhea dropped 80 percent. People talking to people is still the way to spread a slow solution. My calling is to help spread the solution to the human problem offered by God Himself. We want everyone to call upon the Name of Jesus and so be saved. But if a radio program or podcast were all that we were doing to spread it, it would not be enough.
God knows it’s not enough. That’s why when God decided it was time to implement and share His solution, He didn’t opt for high-tech, low-touch. He chose to become human, to be with us, to be one of us, to be close to us, and then to send His followers on foot into every house, home, and hut, to save the world at the speed of relationships. Which may seem impractical and inefficient to us, but this is in fact the only way the world can be saved. Not only because relationships are the most effective means, but also because relationships are the goal. Restored life-giving relationships, fellowship with God, and people caring for God’s creation, that’s the goal. That is salvation. It’s what we’re being saved for.
So maybe it seems strange that Paul, the servant of Jesus, would write a letter, which was the high-tech, low-touch delivery system of his day. But Paul wrote the letter so that it could become part of God’s in-person delivery system. Paul wrote the letter to be read for a community, for people, who gathered together in person every week to talk, to listen to their local preacher talk, and then to talk together, and to talk with God through prayer and song, and then to talk with their friends and their family and their neighbors about what God had done and what God is doing. Seventy some generations later, God’s solution is still spreading, but there are still so many who do not call upon Jesus.
So, we still need boots and sandals on the ground. Because how will they call on Him if they haven’t trusted in Him? And how will they trust in Him if they haven’t heard of Him? And how will they hear of Him unless someone speaks of Him? And how will they speak of Him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news.” And if it seems slow, wait for it.
Would you pray with me? Lord God, Heavenly Father, the harvest is so plentiful, yet the workers are few. We beg You, send out more workers into Your harvest field, pastors, teachers, missionaries, evangelists, vocational, bi-vocational, everyone, Your witness. In the Name of Your Son, Jesus, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, One God now and forever. Amen.
Reflections for July 30, 2023
Title: If It Seems Slow, Wait for ItMark Eischer: And we’re back with our Speaker, Dr. Mike Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Hello, Mark.
Mark Eischer: You spoke today of how faith is shared through trusting relationships, but that takes so long. If God wants everyone to be saved, how do you explain why He’s chosen such a seemingly slow way of getting the word out? What about all those who are born, live, and die without ever having been reached? I think of how the Iditarod started out as an urgent race to bring medicine to people who were desperately sick. Well, here, God has the cure for sin and death and it seems like he’s dragging His feet, as you said, working at the speed of relationships. Or is my focus misplaced somehow?
Mike Zeigler: Oh, these are such good questions and I’m glad you’re asking them. Again, we have to clarify what it means to be saved. So to be saved means that a person is brought out of separation from God and back into a life-giving relationship with God, the way we were designed to live. So if I were to say, I wish God wouldn’t take so much time working through relationships to save people. That would be like saying, “I wish my best friend didn’t want to spend so much time with me, hanging out with me, and talking with me. I wish we could just say we’re best friends and be done with all this hanging out and spending time together.” So if I were to say that, in that case, I wouldn’t be making friendship faster, I wouldn’t be making it more efficient, I’d simply be changing the definition of friendship.
Mark Eischer: All right. I understand that relationships take time to nurture, to build and maintain. But it doesn’t answer that question, “Why then some are saved but not others?”
Mike Zeigler: And that’s true. We don’t have an answer to that question. But here’s what we do know. We know that God is relational to the core, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. God is family, God is friendship, God is fellowship of mutual love and trust from eternity. So it makes sense that God would create a world that is also relational to the core. And also that there are terrible and possibly eternal consequences when we betray God—that is when we give our deepest trust and love to the things that God has made rather than to God Himself.
So, it would be like someone pretending to be your friend only because they want to use your stuff. And in that case, the broken relationship can only be saved, the only medicine to save the relationship is for the friend, for God in this case, to show us that He’s better, He’s more trustworthy, more reliable, more satisfying than the sum of all His stuff. And so the solution’s not medicinal, it’s always relational. The medicine we need is for God to show us that He is the only One we need. And He’s done that for us in Jesus. And so as people who trust in Jesus, we talk about who He is in our human relationships, what He’s done for us, what He still promises to do. Because that Word from God, as Paul says in Romans 10, that’s the only way we can be saved.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Spread the Reign of God the Lord” arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
“From God Can Nothing Move Me” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.