Lord, Send Reformation.
Rev. Jonathan David Faulkner
I first heard of the idea of an Ouroboros about a month ago when I first listened to a new song Demon Hunter released through their website from their album that would later release September 12th entitled “There Was A Light Here.” (You can read the review here). The idea comes from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs and is generally depicted as a snake eating its tail forming a figure eight. For those of you who have not made the connection, it is where we get our modern infinity symbol from. Generally, it can be used as a symbol of wholeness, eternity or life and death. The first known instance appears in the tomb of King Tutankhamen in a painting describing the birth of the sun god Rah. The Egyptians also used it to describe the flooding of the Nile on a yearly basis as it came to symbolize birth through destruction.[i]
Since I first heard the song, I have thought a lot about this imagery and how it describes the American Church. The song, which is one of the heavier tracks on TWALH, is a shot at bad faith actors on the right and the left who try to make the church into their own image and bend its will for themselves. Who intentionally divide and destroy the church in hopes of making it into something that supports their viewpoints rather than reflective of Christ. In the end the singer questions whether or not we will leave a faith legacy to the next generation or just “vacant holes” who “deface this host.”
Given Demon Hunter’s use of Anglo-Catholic imagery throughout the album art and lyrics of TWALH. I can only assume “Deface this host” is a reference to “The Host” that is broken during the Eucharistic Rite. In the prayers Anglican’s ask that this Host: “might become for us the very body…of Jesus Christ.” Anglicanism also teaches that we, the Church, are one with the Host and so by defacing the host we are defacing Christ. The point is that the next generation will deface both Christ and the church because they do not know what the church teaches and the desires of many on both the right and the left to impose their own version of the church onto them will cause them to turn around and persecute the church.
And we are on a deadly cycle, think of the issue, Deconstruction, Women in Ministry, who you vote for, where you stand on abortion, ect, ect, ect. Someone is trying to force you into one camp or the other while making that hot button issue a litmus test for what “true faith” is while becoming increasingly hostile to the other parties, even when they are in agreement. We get fractured into increasingly smaller and smaller camps and told we have to hate those who are not entirely on our side and agree with us.
Look at the rhetoric surrounding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Let me preface this by saying that political violence is never acceptable, it does not matter who it is, no one deserves to be assassinated. I also disagreed with Kirk on a lot of things, but Kirk was not my enemy, our enemy was the principalities and powers of this present darkness. Which often manifest in this world in the form of fascism and political assassination. But the media coverage and person on social media have done two things. Either he is canonized as a saint or martyr or villainized him and celebrated his death. Neither response is appropriate and only continues to drive the very wedge that has us eating our own tail. Yet, there are those who are trying to make your response to Kirk’s assassination as a litmus test for which “side” you’re on. For example, there have been posts going around telling pastors they “must” hold a moment of silence for Kirk in their churches this week. One post I saw read: “If your pastor did not mention Charlie Kirk this week, you’re at the wrong church.”
Do we not see how ridiculous this litmus test is? Do we not see how dangerous?
In his book “The Coddling of the American Mind” Jonathan Chait talks about Mysophinos 3 great Untruths. They are: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings and Life is a battle between good and evil people.” The last one: “Life is a battle between good and evil people” is the untruth of black and white thinking, or the stripping of our ability to think objectively and abstractly about things. That is what we see in the response to Charlie Kirk’s death and in so many issues within the Church. Granted, there are people who do and say evil things: Hitler, did and said some terrible things, he was a racial supremacist and mass murderer, that is evil. those ideas should be condemned, but the humanity of the person saying them should never be out of view. It is hard to see Hitler as a human being responding to his times in his location, a human who made the wrong decisions and chose abominable evil, but still a human.
It is this in this reality and with this in mind that we are exhorted by Scripture to “pray for…all who are in authority.” (1 Timothy 2:1-3). Prayer for our leaders keeps their humanity, their fallenness, their need for God that mirrors our own in our view. It crosses the distance created by geographical position, by social media, by whatever divides us and forces us to focus on the human behind the leader. Our prayer, if they are unsaved or doing evil, should be that they repent and turn from that evil so that they can be saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
I have to tell you friends, this is hard to do, this was hard for me to do as we were leaving Iowa a few years back as the pain of all that was said and done left me bleeding. It has been hard over the last 10 years to see those who disagree with me on any subject as a human being. It has helped to know that this is a conditioned response. It is what they want us to do, not some distant ‘they’ but the people who have sought to throw gasoline on the fires they start and use them to drive the wedges deeper. You know who I am talking about, you’ve seen them posting, heard them on podcasts and talk radio telling you to be afraid, be very afraid.
And like the Ouroboros of Egyptian Myth we end up eating our own tails while we die on fragile hills that, in all actuality, do not line up with Jesus’ teachings for the full council of Scripture. As we take up a culture war that gives Christ a black eye and keeps the next generation from finding the life-giving way of Jesus Christ. We conflate our nation with the Kingdom of God and we do deface the host.
However, an Ouroboros also represents rebirth, through destruction. Like the spring Nile would rise up and flood the dessert, destroying everything in its wake. Eventually those flood waters would recede and the farmland would produce crop after crop that kept Egypt an extremely powerful nation state for thousands of years. The rising floods of cultural influences form the left and the right will rise up to destroy the desert the church in America the church has made of spirituality. Once that desert is destroyed by the flood waters, new life will begin to grow, once the chaff is burned away, the wheat will grow.
We see God do this throughout Church History from the Old Testament to the new with the work of Christ entering and cleansing the temple, through the Middle Ages and into modernity. God is constantly making a way for His people to come back to Him. Why? Because He wants us to have a deep and abiding relationship with him rooted in Him, not in what doctrines we know or what verses we can recite, but in His flesh and blood, in His Eucharist. So, he is constantly calling us back to the table, making a way for us to lay down our swords and make them into plowshares. He is doing it now, making it so obvious that things like Christian Nationalism are heresies that reject His love and care for others that they cannot rightly be called Christian.
This is what we call Reformation, and man are we due for one.
It was false doctrines like the sale of indulgences that led a Monk named Martin Luther to write the 95 Thesis. It was the heresy of denying the sacrament of scripture to the poor that led John Huss to lead the Moravian movement. It is the spirit of Reformation, that comes from the Holy Spirit, that will help us humbly and wisely stand up and reject these heresies that have risen up around us, heresies that deny God while invoking His name. It is the spirit of Reformation that will bring us back to a place where true renewal and revival are possible.
Brothers and Sisters, The Spirit of God is calling us back to Himself, He has made it obvious what is wrong and why it is wrong. We must listen before the graves of our children stay filled on resurrection day, before they deface the Host by persecuting the Church. We must untangle faith and politics and let the nation of America be the nation of America, come what may, and the Kingdom of God be the Kingdom of God which it will be forever.
[i] https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/ouroboros/ Accessed September 18th 2025
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