Lent means going into the desert and letting go

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Father Perry D. Leiker, pastor.

By Father Perry D. Leiker, pastor
“Looking Ahead” is a reflection on the Sunday readings by Father Perry.
“There’s something about it that makes sense, Lent. You give something up, and everything’s more joyful.” — Elaine Stritch.
What takes Matthew and Luke about 11 verses to say, Mark says simply in two verses.
Immediately after his baptism, the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for 40 days and nights where he was “tempted by Satan, among the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.”
This is our Lenten journey. Get alone. Get naked (spiritually speaking).
Be tempted. Be surrounded by wild and scary realities. Become dependent on God. Become vulnerable.
Religion is safe; faith is insecure. Faith is going into the unknown. Faith means less dependence on what I can get and more dependence on waiting to see, opening to find, and listening to hear.
This Lent we might be tempted to “make that promise” that we can measure and prove we kept. In the end, once again, we were right.
We did it!
We proved our goodness and faithfulness to our word. It is not bad, but it is possible it does not include God in the equation.
It is not so much what we do, but what God does in us. Lent means going into the desert and letting go.
What little idols do we cling to? For we go into the desert to be loosed from them. The Jews were led there on their way to the promised land and they bickered and lost faith and sought out even more Baal gods.
It was the desert that stripped them down to who they really were and to their greatest need for God in their lives.
Lent offers us the same. It is precisely in our nakedness and emptiness, weariness and loneliness that we most find our God.
Let us not be afraid to do something new, pray a little more, forgive or ask to be forgiven, give something away (money, time, love) , and finally to be found by our God.
Father Perry D. Leiker is the 14th pastor of St. Bernard Catholic Church. Reach him at (323) 255-6142. Email Father Perry at pleiker@stbernard-church.com. Follow Father Perry on Twitter: @MrDeano76.
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