The People Who Look Like Jesus (Copy)

We begin this summer not where we expect — not with arrival, not with celebration, not at the Temple. We begin somewhere far away, with longing. With someone realizing: I am not home.

Psalm 120 opens the Songs of Ascents in distress, and that is not a mistake. These fifteen psalms were pilgrimage songs — prayed and sung by Jewish worshipers on the road to Jerusalem, families traveling roads their grandparents had walked, parents teaching children who they were and whose they were. And the collection begins, brilliantly, in exile. Because pilgrimage begins when comfort breaks. Nobody starts climbing toward God because everything feels like home.

This summer we are learning to pray these songs together — not merely to study them, but to let them form us. To let them take our scattered, anxious, often-disordered lives and slowly shape us into a people on the way.

Psalm 120 teaches us that spiritual pilgrimage often begins when we finally stop pretending temporary things can carry eternal weight. We spend enormous energy trying to turn temporary things into ultimate things — families, careers, comfort, politics — and real life has a way of exposing them. The ache remains. And that ache, the psalm suggests, is not evidence against faith. It is often the beginning of it.

The psalm moves from distress to calling to answering. The Psalmist doesn't arrive anywhere by verse 7. The hostility is still there. The war is still there. But something has happened: he has told the truth — to God, about where he actually is. Prayer, this psalm insists, is not primarily a tool for getting or doing. It is fundamentally about becoming. We often want prayer to change our circumstances faster than we want prayer to change us.

As we begin this journey through the Songs of Ascents, we are invited to do the same. To name our Meshech. To pray our exile. To walk — together — toward Zion.