Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’

-Bible, Gospel of Luke chapter 14

As a kid some of our earliest theology was about heaven and hell. Heaven was a place where the streets were made of gold. Rubies and emeralds adorned every doorknob and lamppost, while pasty white cherubim sang acapella tunes endlessly.

Hell, on the other hand, was like dying in Super Mario Brothers – a fire pit, with lava, where you burned endlessly for all eternity with short breaks into between to be tortured by red devils who looked like the mascot for some hot sauce brand. As a young person the idea of hell was so incredibly terrifying that you would avoid just about anything to not end up there.

The above timeline graphically represents an interesting wrinkle in this understanding of the afterlife. As a young child, you were deemed incapable of really knowing the difference between right and wrong and so there was a grace period before you were at any risk of going to hell when you died. Represented by the light blue line, this meant young children were bound for heaven in the event of their untimely death.

However, sometime around age twelve or thirteen, as kids hit puberty, they could start to know the difference between right and wrong or to put it another way were capable of “sinning”. It was then that they began to be responsible for where they’d go when they die.

The solution to not ending up in Dante’s Inferno was getting baptized in the church. As the red line on the chart represents, the longer you lived life without getting baptized, the greater your chances of dying and ending up in hell. Baptism was a type of spiritual insurance – you might not need it today, but you were left exposed in the event that something disastrous happened.

So off we all went to get dunked in the baptismal…

They say that baptism is like a wedding between you and Jesus (men picture yourself in a beautiful white gown from David’s Bridal). The forming of an eternal covenant between person and God.

You exchange vows. For God, those vows sound like Isaiah chapter fifty-four verse ten: “For the mountains may move and the hills disappear, but even then my faithful love for you will remain.” For the person it’s the baptismal confession: they confess their love and commitment, say “I do” to God and then are lowered down into the waters.

Then, you come up out of the waters. Congratulations, you’re now married to Jesus!

***

Baptisms sometimes came at the end of a long deliberate process of discernment, where the person really considered their beliefs and life direction. But they often happened as a spur of the moment emotional decision.

Like say, someone is pressured to be baptized at the tail end of an emotional service or weeklong retreat. The pastor is preaching a real tear jerker and people are sobbing in the aisles. They sing forty-nine verses of “Just As I Am” so that anybody who is on the fence about going forward can really stew in their indecision.

This happened because of the logic of the above graphic. So-called “salvation” was a dichotomous outcome. Rather than being about directionality and posture, you were “in” or “out”, hell’s inferno or heaven’s harps. And so, it made sense to get people in, by any means necessary. Though the tactics may seem manipulative or fear based, they are justified if you believe the chart above.

And so, people would get baptized, not fully realizing what they’d gotten themselves into. The church would deem it a success story – another soul plucked from the fire. It was a done deal, mission accomplished. Then the church would move on to more pressing concerns: there were so many unsaved souls in the world that the drive for more baptisms could never cease.

For the person who just got baptized, I imagine the subsequent period felt a bit like the morning after a wild night out in Vegas. They’d wake up bleary eyed from the all-night spiritual bender to the realities of day to day living. The emotions of the conversion experience begin to come down, they return to their families and workplaces supposedly different but feeling mostly the same as before.

More than that, now they’re married to Jesus. In the excitement of it all they had gone to the Elvis Chapel and tied the knot with the Son of Man in the middle of the night. What to do with this strange new spouse they just met out on the Strip?

We place so much emphasis on the wedding day, but as old married couples can tell you that day is not indicative of a successful relationship. There are many day in and day out tests over the course of years and decades for which love, lust, and emotion cannot prepare you. Therefore, it makes sense to take your time in considering who you yoke yourself to.

There’s no rush to get married. If you’re feeling unsure, give yourself some more time. Go talk to a marriage therapist, do a pre-marital assessment, ask more questions, find out what your boyfriend’s credit score is. It takes gushing, starry-eyed, head-over-heels feelings to get married, but a somewhat cold, calculating assessment to stay married.

There are always exceptions to the rule. In getting married, there’s no definitively right or wrong way to do it. Some relationships succeed against all odds, while others fail for seemingly no reason. Baptism follows the same pattern: some fulfill a lifelong commitment despite a religiously toxic environment, while others walk away having amply prepared.

But it makes sense to approach baptism with all the seriousness and preparation of getting married. It is a large, life changing decision that takes time to consider. This choice should be the result of a thoughtful decision-making process that involves sufficient periods of silence, prayer, and an examination of one’s own feelings. There should be input from people you respect and who have your best interests in mind. Baptism is a beautiful thing, not to be rushed but to be enjoyed and savored.

Unfortunately, we often see just the opposite. Brand-new Christians wake up the next morning and look over at Jesus. “eh…what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Then they walk out the hotel room door and never see him again.

A Wild Night Out in Vegas