Bill Whitlow is a decorated World War II bomber pilot. He is also my father-in-law. He doesn’t let me forget either one. It’s sad really, but the high point of his life was flying B-17 bombing missions from England over Germany. For years he didn’t talk about it; nowadays I have to remind him to breathe between stories. After seeing the movie Pearl Harbor and the fuel supply dilemma of the pilots in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, he told me about how careful they had to be to monitor their fuel supply. You come to a certain time in the mission when the flight engineer announces you will soon reach ‘the point of no return," beyond which you can no longer turn back to land safely at home base.

There comes just such a point of no return into every life of discipleship. The same is true for this band of Jesus followers, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Ten years on the road with Jesus. It’s been fun and exciting, hasn’t it? Challenging too. We have come far, but Jesus calls us still on. To go with him this next part of the mission will mean abandoning the safety of home we have known. Going beyond the point of no return. Are we prepared?

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 abruptly and disturbingly turns his face toward Jerusalem. If they would follow him, they must understand there is no turning back. Decide.

Jesus keeps generating crises for those who follow him. They enter a Samaritan village and 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.

It reminds me of a young boy who asked his mother how to become a Christian. His mom was driving at the time and tried to answer as best she could, explaining that you have to ask Jesus to come into your heart. The boy insisted 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 they prayed and pulled back onto the road, a disquieting quiet descended for several miles. Finally, the boy broke the silence. Okay, Mom, I want him out now. [Thanks to Glen Schmucker for this report on Ed Crow’s grandson.]

Well, some of us would do well to say the same thing. 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 is not locked up inside us; it is among us and ahead of us, calling us onward. We like to say we are free and faithful Baptists, but we are never the one without the other: our freedom is found in our faithful following of Jesus.

Now Samaritans are sometimes examples in Luke of virtue and unexpected inclusion in the kingdom. Jews generally rejected them as half-breed, Torah-only infidels who worshipped on Mt. Gerizim instead of Mt. Zion. Jesus did not reject them. One chapter later he tells the story of the Good Samaritan as an example of 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.

Do we know anything about the struggle over who are the true followers of Jesus? Which group is being faithful in following Jesus and which is trying to enlist him to its agenda? The Samaritans and Jews knew how to bomb each other with anathemas. They could sling shibboleths with the best of us. We can hold our own too.

We’ve been fighting for years over who are the true Baptists. Who are the Samaritans and who the Jews? Who are the true people of God? We are, we say. We are, they say. It comes down to a he said, she said. (We are the "she said," don’t you know?!) God knows we’re right, but we shan’t prove it by turning up the volume on our little shouting matches. God alone will sort it out in the end.

In the meantime, don’t look now, but we have come to a point of no return. Will we follow the lead of James and John and remain preoccupied with our mixed up cousins? Will we try to call down the bombs of heaven on the heads of those who would prefer we not show up at the family reunion? Whenever we get caught up in that, Jesus turns his face back from the Jerusalem road just long enough to rebuke us and call us to follow him instead. We cannot afford to waste time anathematizing when an anesthetized world awaits awakening. We have the good news of the kingdom to proclaim.

Farther along the road Jesus issues three similar calls to discipleship that create crises for would-be disciples. The first is a man who says he will follow Jesus wherever he will take him, but Jesus makes sure he knows there is no soft bed on the hard road with him. Foxes have holes, birds have nests, the Son of man has no place to lay his head. Next, a man asks Jesus just to wait for him to fulfill a single family obligation. And finally, another fellow just wants time to kiss the missus and hug the kids before traipsing off to God knows where. Jesus is unyielding.

If you knew that following Jesus guaranteed you no creature comforts, no material blessings, but only a life of danger and adventure, would you follow him? Anyone tuning into a call to missions or ministry must reckon with that question.

Rabbi Larry Jackofsky oversees the southwestern district of Reform Jewish congregations. We recently lamented together over pasta the paucity of young clergy. A recent Alban Institute study has Baptist clergy under 35 in the 8% range of all clergy, give or take. [Hillary Wicai, "Clergy by the Numbers," in Congregations (Mar-Apr 2001):9. The 8% figure is an interpolation of American Baptists, 6% and Southern Baptists, 11%.] What do you make of that? My friend Rabbi Jake says it follows the economy. When there’s money to be made, young people are drawn, if not pushed, toward high paying careers. When things are off, they turn to 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? Is that what the disciples were thinking? Fishing industry is off just now, Jesus caught us at a good time? So the kingdom of God is a jobs program, is it? Listen, if the moderate Baptist movement is to grow and thrive, more of us are going to have to issue the call in Jesus’ name and more will have to answer it. We do well emphasizing the priesthood of all believers, but we cannot neglect the vocational call to some for Christian service. And let me commend the ministry to you all: it is a wonderful calling — sometimes a lousy job, but always a wonderful calling!

It’s not just young people who face career decisions though. Over and again in the last ten years we have seen paid Christians among us struggle with security issues as they decide how to follow Jesus. This has been a major deterrent to progress in our churches that are looking to pastors for leadership. Braces to pay for, cars, college, retirement just round the corner: honorable family obligations. Amazing how things like that tend to blur our vision of the kingdom, shake our convictions, and mollify our leadership.

Our new Baptist heroes these days are those who have chosen calling over career in the struggle of conscience, and have paid a dear price for it. We know what is right in our hearts, but sometimes we feel censored by circumstance, muted by family matters. Maybe that’s why Jesus is so unbending about our tending to family business before throwing ourselves into kingdom business. He knows how seductive it is, how easy it is for us substitute temporal things for eternal. Foxes have holes …

The challenge is further complicated by the notion that following Jesus among CBF-type folk limits the pool of churches one might serve and may even endanger one’s position in a present church. And that is true as it goes. Conflict is inevitable. We don’t all agree on everything like some other Baptists seem to. Well excuse us!

People also talk about CBF having peaked, leveled off. They can’t see the future in it. So that’s the point? I didn’t know. We’re supposed to know the future before we follow Jesus? It’s about secure and successful careers? Martin Luther might have liked to know that before he stood before the Diet of Worms and declared, "My conscience is captive to the Word of God. To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand." Foxes have holes…

There is a cost of discipleship, as Bonhoeffer aptly put it. But in an equally apt phrase, Dallas Willard reminds us of the cost of nondiscipleship. It’s an opportunity cost. The cost of what might have been. How will we ever know what the Lord has in store for us if we do not give Jesus the chance to show us?

In 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran named Major John Wesley Powell determined to be the first to explore the full length of the vast river of the Grand Canyon. He headed out with three boats and nine other men, against the advice of Native Americans who predicted his certain death. At one point the rapids had been so strong and perilous, three men left the party and began a walk to civilization. O. G. Howland, his brother Seneca, and Bill Dunn, tried to convince Major Powell to quit the river. We surely will all die if we continue this journey, they said. What happened ironically is that Powell and his group survived, while the three that left at Separation Canyon were never heard from again. As it turned out, the remaining adventurers had to go through only two more sets of rapids before having calm water the rest of the way. Fear conquered faith in some; faith conquered fear in others.

Jesus’ road to the cross brings us to a crossroad: turn back or follow? Jesus calls us to let go of a world passing away in order to get hold of a world coming to pass.

What if John Smyth, that Church of England minister in the early 1600s, had asked Jesus to let him stay behind and bury what he saw as a spiritually deadening church. He could have quietly cashed his government paycheck, but who would have begun the Baptist movement? What of Thomas Helwys, rotting away there alone in a London prison, holding out for the truth that no prince or pope 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 control? Where would the Baptist missions movement have been if the cobbler William Carey had been more concerned with leather soles than heathen souls? And where would we be today if ten years ago some courageous Baptists among us had not forged ahead in faith and followed Jesus, though ridiculed by many that were family to them?

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 behind, but not as an excuse for staying behind. There is a time for looking back, but not as an excuse for holding back. At the point of no return, Jesus calls us to move ahead.

In August of 1418 the city leaders of Florence issued a competition for the completion of a dome over the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore. The church had been under construction for over a century, but plans called for a dome that would span 143 feet, still the largest such vault in the world. To make matters worse, the powers to be insisted that it be accomplished without the aid of those clunky, inelegant flying buttresses seen throughout the rest of Europe they considered gauche. The proposed feat was impossible by the standards of the day, but the original planners held a touching faith that at some point in the future God might provide a solution. [Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome:How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (New York: Walker & Company, 2000), p.5.] And provide God did. Along came a goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi with an ingenious design of a double-barreled vault that defied all previous conventions. (Curious phrase, eh? — all previous conventions!) They said it couldn’t be done, but Brunelleschi persevered amid unending derision and jealousies. He stuck to his vision and convictions, and today his remarkable dome adorns the beautiful church that stands sentinel over that great Italian city of flowers.

We have only begun to build, CBF! It’s all right not to know how this structure will turn out or whether this project will stand the test of time. We are free today to be faithful to our mission. We have a God to glorify and a Jesus to follow.

No turning back.