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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\u2019s 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)

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Psalm 120 is the first of the Psalms of Ascent.\xa0 So as we start off once again on our Psalm series, we start on a very particular journey\u2014the prayerful, singing journey up to Jerusalem with the Israelites\u2014the journey in other words, of discipleship.

It\u2019s 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.\xa0 Meshek is located thousands of kilometers away from Jerusalem somewhere in the south of present-day Russia.\xa0 Kedar refers to a wandering tribe of nomads that resided somewhere to the south of Israel.\xa0

But Meshek and Kedar also have a figurative meaning.\xa0 Meshek would have been a strange place to the Israelites.\xa0 Far away and inescapably foreign.\xa0 Kedar was better known, but known as a violent, even barbaric tribe: hostile to the Israelites.\xa0

The Psalmist and the Israelite pilgrims felt the tension that arose from these figurative places of hostility and far-flung strangeness: \u201cWoe to me that I dwell in Meshek, that I live among the tents of Kedar!\u201d\xa0 It is as if to say, this place where I am is not my home\u2014it\u2019s hostile, it\u2019s distant, the people are cruel and warmongering lies abound.\xa0 So the prayer of the Psalm: \u201cSave me, Lord, from these lying lips and from deceitful tongues.\u201d

The beginning of the Israelite\u2019s journey was a reminder that they weren\u2019t home and that they didn\u2019t belong.\xa0 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.\xa0 \xa0\xa0\xa0

This is actually where any true journey of faith begins: in a recognition that we\u2019re far from home in a place we don\u2019t belong.\xa0 Christians have long recognized this.\xa0 I like the way Dante says it in the opening lines of the Divine Comedy. He writes: \u201cMidway through the journey of our life, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.\u201d\xa0 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.\xa0 Picture the prodigal son.\xa0 All of a sudden he woke up to the memory of his Father\u2019s house.\xa0 Immediately he turns away from the paths that had left him destitute and begins that long journey back home to the Father.\xa0

That journey is the same one that the Israelites walked on their way up to Jerusalem every year.\xa0 It\u2019s the same journey any of us walk when we give up and cry out any version of the prayer \u201cLord, save me.\u201d\xa0 Throughout our Christian lives: this is the discipleship journey we walk.\xa0 The journey of repentance, which is in other words, the journey that turns us back home to God.\xa0

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