My father-in-law Bill Whitlow is a decorated bomber pilot—WWII, the Big One, don’t you know?!  He flew B-17’s from England on bombing missions into Europe.  For years he didn’t talk about it; nowadays he hardly stops to breathe.  He’s hard of hearing but not mute.  The portrayal of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in the movie Pearl Harbor, made me ask about fuel supply.  He told me about how careful they had to be to monitor it on their missions.  You come to a certain time in the journey when the flight engineer informs the pilot that they will soon reach “the point of no return.”  It’s a moment of decision: if you go on you will not be able to turn back to where you left from and land safely home.

There comes just such point of no return in our life of discipleship, too.  We realize that we have wandered around with Jesus long enough that it creates a crisis for us that requires a new decision.  We either go ahead and follow him to an unknown future, abandoning all the safety of home we have known, or we let him go on without us.  Jesus makes the choice clear: turn back or follow him to land in a destination unplanned.

This is just the point of no return we reach in Luke’s gospel at the end of chapter 9.  Would-be disciples have been happily hanging round Jesus for some chapters now, but Jesus suddenly and disturbingly turns his face toward Jerusalem.  If they would follow him, they must understand there is no turning back.  Decide.

Look at the encounters they have along the way and the crises of decision Jesus generates.  They enter a Samaritan village. Jesus is not welcome there because he won’t stay on their terms and be their messiah.  When they learn he is going on to Jerusalem, they turn away from him. 

This reminds me of the young boy who began to ask his mother about how to become a Christian.  His mom explained that you have to ask Jesus to come into your heart.  Her son insisted that he was ready to do just that right then and there.  So she pulled the car over to the side of the road and her son prayed for Jesus to come into his heart.  After the car was back on the road a queer quiet ensued between them.  Finally, the boy broke the silence saying, Okay, Mom, I want him out now.  [Thanks to Glen Schmucker for this story of Ed Crow’s daughter and grandson.]

Well, we know the rightness of our language about asking Jesus into our hearts, but some of us would do just as well to ask him out.  Jesus doesn’t rest easy in our hearts.  He stirs them and disturbs them until they are ready to give up holding onto him and give in to following him instead.  The kingdom of God is not just within us; it is among us and ahead of us.  If we are to experience it fully, we have to follow Jesus wherever he wants to take us.

Now Samaritans are sometimes examples in Luke of virtue and inclusion in the kingdom.  Even though Jews generally rejected them as half-breed, Torah-only infidels who worshipped on Mt. Gerizim instead of Mt. Zion, Jesus does not reject them.  One chapter after this one he tells the story of the Good Samaritan to show what discipleship requires of us all.  But included people can exclude themselves when they demand Jesus remain in their hearts and follow them instead of the other way round.

Within the Christian community there is always a struggle among who are the true followers of Jesus.  Which group is being faithful in following Jesus and which is just trying to enlist him to their agenda?  The Samaritans and Jews knew how to bomb each other with anathemas.  They could sling shibboleths as good as any Baptist today.  We hold our own now.  We’ve been fighting for years over whose interpretation of Baptist tradition is purest.  Churches like ours have one take, churches down the road have another. 

This is convention season for Baptists, so you’re hearing about this more nowadays.  The conflict has brought us to a point of no return.  We have decided to as a church to move on, and we believe we have done so in following Jesus.  Even so, we must be careful of the attitude of the disciples. They suggest to Jesus that they call down the bombs of heaven on their heads.  All that does, though, is keep us from following Jesus in kingdom mission.  This is why we don’t as a church spend our time whipping up on other kinds of Baptists or other kinds of Christians we disagree with.  Whenever we get caught up in that, Jesus turns his face back from Jerusalem just long enough to rebuke us and call us to follow him instead.

Down the road Jesus issues three similar calls to discipleship that create a crisis for would-be disciples, each more intense and seemingly unreasonable.  The first is a man who says he will follow Jesus wherever he will take him, but Jesus makes sure he understands point blank that there’s no turning back to a soft bed once you’ve set out on the hard road with him.  Foxes have holes, birds have nests, the Son of man has no place to lay his head.  The second is a man who wants to tend to a single family obligation first.  The third just wants to say goodbye before he leaves.  Jesus is unyielding.  The kingdom awaits.  Follow me.  Decide.

If you knew that following Jesus meant giving up your home, your SUV, and your country club membership, would you follow Jesus?  If you knew you had to give up your long-held dreams to follow Jesus, would you?  If you knew that following him guaranteed you no material blessings but only a life of danger and adventure, would you follow him?

Rabbi Larry Jackofsky oversees this district of Reform Jewish congregations.  We lamented over pasta recently the paucity of young clergy in Jewish and Christian ministry.  He said it follows the economy.  When people are making a lot of money, young people are drawn, if not pushed, toward high paying careers.  When things are off, they turn to the ministry.

So let me get this straight: we give up everything and follow Jesus only when we think there isn’t much to give up?  What were the disciples thinking?  Fishing industry is off just now, Jesus caught us at a good time?  What, the kingdom of God is a jobs program?!

It’s not just career ministers that have such a crisis.  One of our members asked me the other day about what percentage of the congregation tithes.  I didn’t know exactly but guessed,  maybe 10-15%.  Why?  Is it not that we are finding our security in the wrong things.  Rich in things and poor in soul.  Jesus calls us to follow him without promise of worldly security.  His road to the cross brings us to a crossroad: turn back or follow.

Another man tells Jesus he’ll be right with him, just as soon as he buries his father.  And more sensibly still, a third man says he’ll catch up with Jesus as soon as he kisses the missus and hugs the kids goodbye.  Jesus seems to us out of touch, but maybe Jesus thinks it is we who are out of touch with his kingdom, continually substituting the kingdom of this world for the next.  We think we can carry our earthly obligations with us in following heavenly pursuits and manage everything in a nice balance.  As if we can put the kingdom of God on the top of our to-do list: can you ever check it off as complete?  We are always trying to make the eternal temporal and the temporal eternal.  Jesus calls us to let go of a world passing away in order to get hold of a world coming to pass.

Family responsibilities are not, of course, evil or to be shirked.  You don’t abandon three of your eight children on a city bus because you have to serve the Lord.  You bring children into the world and God expects you to see to their care.  Your parents bring you into the world and God expects you to honor them all your life.  Sometimes being faithful to God and following Jesus means choosing your family over unreasonable demands of work.

But while family may be a greenhouse for growing long-stem disciples, it can also become a hothouse of prejudice producing weeds in the garden of God.  It’s time the Christians stopped focusing on the family for the sake of the family and started focusing on the family for the sake of the family of God. 

Any of you grow up in churches where everyone was brother this or sister that?  You were probably poor, because once people get money they like to be known by their family name in church.   Churches call each other Sister Gladys and Brother George to remind themselves that flesh and blood does not inherit the kingdom of God.  Nobody gets to take a last name to heaven.  The family of destiny takes precedence over the family of origin.  We orient our lives that way.

Imagine where we would be as Baptists if our heroes and heroines had been looking back instead of forward.  If they had been unwilling to break from family and church traditions to follow Jesus? 

John Smyth, a Church of England minister in the early 1600’s, considered the church he served as spiritually dead.  Had he remained committed to burying it and collecting his government paycheck in the process what would have come of the Baptist movement?  Where would we be today?  And what of Thomas Helwys, rotting away there alone in a London prison, holding out for the truth that no temporal authority— whether princes or popes—has eternal authority over others?  Would Roger Williams have learnt religious liberty from another source, and would Baptists have announced across these American centuries the kingdom of God that is by divine nature free from government intrusion?  And what of the cobbler William Carey, the founder of the modern missions movement?  If he had been thinking only of leather soles instead of heathen souls, would the Baptist vision have ever left England? 

We have made it fifty years now as a church, not by asking how we would be faithful to our fathers and mothers that founded this body but by asking how we would be faithful as they to the one Lord is the foundation of his church in every age.  Jesus calls us to a single-minded devotion to the kingdom of God.  We cannot plow ahead and look behind at the same time.  There is a time for looking back, but it is not at the point where Jesus calls us to plow ahead.

What is there in your life today that competes with Jesus’ call and claim upon your life?  Are you willing to go with him beyond the point of no return?  No turning back?