Dec 27, 2022
I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues. What will he do to you, and what more besides, you deceitful tongue? He will punish you with a warrior’s sharp arrows, with burning coals of the broom bush. Woe to me that I dwell in Meshek, that I live among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I lived among those who hate peace. I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war. (Psalm 120)
Psalm 120 is the first of the Psalms of Ascent. So as we start off once again on our Psalm series, we start on a very particular journey—the prayerful, singing journey up to Jerusalem with the Israelites—the journey in other words, of discipleship.
It’s fitting that this journey begins with Psalm 120, because it is set about as far away from Jerusalem as you can get, both figuratively and geographically. Meshek is located thousands of kilometers away from Jerusalem somewhere in the south of present-day Russia. Kedar refers to a wandering tribe of nomads that resided somewhere to the south of Israel.
But Meshek and Kedar also have a figurative meaning. Meshek would have been a strange place to the Israelites. Far away and inescapably foreign. Kedar was better known, but known as a violent, even barbaric tribe: hostile to the Israelites.
The Psalmist and the Israelite pilgrims felt the tension that arose from these figurative places of hostility and far-flung strangeness: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshek, that I live among the tents of Kedar!” It is as if to say, this place where I am is not my home—it’s hostile, it’s distant, the people are cruel and warmongering lies abound. So the prayer of the Psalm: “Save me, Lord, from these lying lips and from deceitful tongues.”
The beginning of the Israelite’s journey was a reminder that they weren’t home and that they didn’t belong. This gave them a reason to turn to God and cry out, beginning both the physical and the spiritual journey back home to God as embodied at Jerusalem.
This is actually where any true journey of faith begins: in a recognition that we’re far from home in a place we don’t belong. Christians have long recognized this. I like the way Dante says it in the opening lines of the Divine Comedy. He writes: “Midway through the journey of our life, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.” Once we wake up to this reality of being lost, the very next step called of us, is a step of repentance: a word that quite literally means to turn, in this case, toward God.
Knowing that we are far from home and bereft of belonging is actually a good thing when it turns us back toward home. Picture the prodigal son. All of a sudden he woke up to the memory of his Father’s house. Immediately he turns away from the paths that had left him destitute and begins that long journey back home to the Father.
That journey is the same one that the Israelites walked on their way up to Jerusalem every year. It’s the same journey any of us walk when we give up and cry out any version of the prayer “Lord, save me.” Throughout our Christian lives: this is the discipleship journey we walk. The journey of repentance, which is in other words, the journey that turns us back home to God.