Patrick Comerford
The week began with the First Sunday after Trinity (Trinity I, 22 June 2025). I am back in Stony Stratford, having spent yesterday as a day of prayer, reflection and thanksgiving in Lichfield, marking the 24th anniversary of my ordination as priest 24 years ago, on the Feast of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist [24 June 2001]. Today is the 25th anniversary of my ordination as deacon on 25 June 2000.
I marked these two anniversaries yesterday at the Patron Festival Eucharist in the chapel of Saint John’s Hospital, Lichfield, at mid-day and Choral Evensong Prayer in Lichfield Cathedral. During the day, I also went for some walks around Lichfield, by Minster Pool and out into the coutryside north of Lichfield along Cross in Hand Lane, and I even caught a glimpse of Comberford from the trains between Lichfield and Tamworth in the morning and in the evening.
Today is an Ember Day, marked on the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in the week before the Sunday nearest to 29 June as days of prayer for those to be ordained deacon or priest. Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, reading today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
Matthew 7: 15-20 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 15 ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? 17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will know them by their fruits.’
Today’s Reflection:
This morning’s reading (Matthew 7: 15-20) returns to our series of readings from the Sermon on the Mount in Saint Matthew’s Gospel. This morning, Jesus warns us of the dangers posed by ‘false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.’ We are to ‘know them by their fruits.’
Immediately after the weekend bombing attack on Iran, carried out in breach of international law and without the sanction of Congress, Donald Trump declared on Saturday night: ‘I want to just thank everybody. And, in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.’
It was a blasphemous obscenity from Trump – as he was flanked by a Catholic Vice-President, JD Vance, a Catholic Secretary of State, Mario Rubio, who has also been a Baptist and a Mormon, and a Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, a member of the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches – claiming God blesses his war-mongering, his violence, his genocide, and invoking God to sanction his evil actions.
How do we recognise wolves in sheep clothing or false prophets who hijack abuse the name of Christ and Christianity today? Let me offer four further names to consider:
1, Allie Beth Stuckey seeks to legitimise the concept of ‘toxic empathy’ in her book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. She describes herself as a Reformed Baptist, is a regular guest on Fox News, and is heard on the podcast ‘Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey’, distributed by Blaze Media, known for its recent film hijacking the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to promote ultra-right ‘Christian Nationalism’ in the US.
Stuckey studied communications at Furman University and has been a publicist and social media strategist on behalf of pro-Trump and MAGA causes. But she has no theological education or degrees that qualify her to make her judgmental theological pronouncements.
Stuckey made a video in 2018 that purported to be an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which the politician appeared to give bizarre answers to the questions put to her by Stuckey. It emerged later that the video plagiarised footage from other interviews spliced to appear as answers to Stuckey’s questions. When the video was widely exposed as a hoax, Stuckey said it was ‘satirical’ and ‘a joke’, but she has not made similar videos or jokes about right-wing politicians.
In her book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, published last October (2024), Stuckey claims that when politics are driven by empathy rather than truth, innocent people pay the price. She claims empathy has become the highest virtue but like so many other words, such as tolerance, justice and acceptance, the word has been hijacked by people who exploit compassion for their own political ends.
She claims ‘toxic empathy’ is the primary tool of persuasion used by progressives to manipulate well-meaning Christians. She says they use toxic empathy ‘by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts and then pervert them to morally extort us into adopting their position.’
Stuckey argues that empathy has become a tool of manipulation by left-wing activists, claiming they bully people into believing that they must adopt progressive positions to be loving. She associates toxic empathy with the issues she is obsessed with: abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration and social justice. She argues empathy should derive from God’s definitions of love, goodness, and justice, and argues there are logical pitfalls and moral consequences for toxic empathy.
‘Our language, our Bible verses, our concepts’? Stuckey seems to imply the Bible and the language of Christianity are the sole preserve of far-right fundamentalists. She complains someone of the same religion can read the shared religious text and come to a different conclusion about its meaning, such as coming to the conclusion that the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus in the Gospels meant what they said about responding with human decency to the outcast, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned, the widowed, and the orphan.
But her notion that there is one and only one correct understanding of Scripture, is a false notion … one might even say it is a toxic notion.
Q, Wolf or Sheep? True prophet or false?
2, Pastor Paula White-Cain, a televangelist and a prominent figure in the charismatic movement, has been a longtime spiritual adviser to Donald Trump and is a proponent of ‘prosperity theology’, which takes advantage of vulnerable believers, promising material blessings in return for donations.
In the past, she has been the pastor at churches that bought her a waterfront mansion for $900,000, paid over $1 million in salaries to her and her family members and paid for their private jet, yet failed to pay mortgages and electricity bills and filed for bankruptcy. One church alleged White had stolen $600,000 in audio-visual equipment.
She chaired the evangelical advisory board for Trump’s 2016 campaign, delivered the invocation at his inauguration in 2017, became his special adviser on the Faith and Opportunity Initiative at the Office of Public Liaison in 2019, and offered an opening prayer before Trump’s speech at the rally shortly before the US Capitol was stormed on 6 January 2021.
White has warned that ‘Christians that don’t support President Trump will have to answer to God.’ Earlier this year (7 February 2025), he appointed White to lead the White House Faith Office.
She once criticised immigration advocates who cited the Gospel account of Jesus’ escape to Egypt as a child, saying: ‘Yes, he did live in Egypt for 3½ years. But it was not illegal. If he had broken the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah.’
Q, Wolf or Sheep? True prophet or false?
3, Mike Huckabee – or, more formally, the Revd Dr Michael Dale Huckabee – has been Trump’s ambassador to Israel since April. He is an ordained Baptist minister, but has also been the Governor of Arkansas (1996-2007), and has hosted a talk show on the Fox News Channel. He has claimed, wrongly that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and alleged Obama supported the Mau-Mau rebels, he outlawed same-sex marriage in Arkansas, and he has repeated the unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
He denies global warming, opposes anti-discrimination legislation, is vocal in opposing migration into the US, and opposes gun control measures. Within hours of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, he told Fox News: ‘We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?’
Before his present appointment, he opposed Palestinian statehood and rejected Palestinian identity as ‘a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.’ At an event in the West Bank in 2017, he said: ‘There is no such thing as a West Bank – it’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighbourhoods. They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.’
When he presented his credentials to President Isaac Herzog, Huckabee claimed Iran wants to destroy Israel and the US. He hardly has the credibility or the credentials to be an impartial mediator or negotiator in any part of the Middle East, or in any conflict.
Q, Wolf or Sheep? True prophet or false?
4, Vance Boelter – or, more formally, the Revd Dr Vance Luther Boelter – has been arrested in connection with the killing of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband and the shooting of a state senator and his wife on 14 June. It turns out he has been an evangelical missionary who has preached in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in recent years, and has long been a Trump supporter and a registered Republican voter.
Boelter has been charged with killing Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and her husband Mark Hortman at their home in Champlin, a suburb of Minneapolis, and with shooting and wounding Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman at their home.
Videos show Boelter preaching from 2021 to 2023 at La Borne Matadi, a church in Matadi, on the western coast of the DRC. In one sermon he says ‘God is going to raise up apostles and prophets in America to correct his church.’ Boelter says he was ordained in 1993, claims a doctorate from Cardinal Stritch University, a private Catholic college in Wisconsin that was shut down in 2023, and says he studied at Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, a charismatic ‘Spirit-filled Bible School’. His other intended targets included Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee last year, and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women members of Congress. So far, Trump has had neither the courtesy nor the courage to pick up the phone and offer words of consolation and assurance to these three politcians or anyone else named on Boetler’s hit list. Then, on the other hand, perhaps it’s no small mercy that he has not managed to shift the the blame onto migrants or refugees, yet.
Q, Wolf or Sheep? True prophet or false?
As I ponder on these thoughts, I find comfort in the opening words of Psalm 82 sung at Choral Evensong in Lichfield Cathedral at the end of the day yesterday:
1 God standeth in the congregation of princes: he is a Judge among gods.
2 How long will ye give wrong judgement: and accept the persons of the ungodly?
3 Defend the poor and fatherless:
see that such as are in need and necessity have right.
4 Deliver the outcast and poor: save the hand of the ungodly.
5 They will not be learned nor understand but walk on still in darkness:
all the foundations of the earth are out of course.
6 I have said Ye are gods: and ye are all the children of the most Highest.
7 But ye shall die like men: and fall like one of the princes.
8 Arise O God and judge thou the earth:
for thou shalt take all heathen to thine inheritance.
Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 25 June 2025):
‘Windrush Day’ is the theme this week (22-28 June) in Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel). This theme was introduced on Sunday with reflections by Rachael Anderson, former Senior Communications and Engagement Manager, USPG.
The USPG prayer diary today (Wednesday 25 June 2025) invites us to pray:
Father God, we pray for our leaders and people with great power. Work through your people to seek the good for all mankind.
The Collect:
O God,
the strength of all those who put their trust in you,
mercifully accept our prayers
and, because through the weakness of our mortal nature
we can do no good thing without you,
grant us the help of your grace,
that in the keeping of your commandments
we may please you both in will and deed;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Collect for those to be ordained:
Almighty God, the giver of all good gifts,
by your Holy Spirit you have appointed
various orders of ministry in the Church:
look with mercy on your servants
now called to be deacons and priests;
maintain them in truth and renew them in holiness,
that by word and good example they may faithfully serve you
to the glory of your name and the benefit of your Church;
through the merits of our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Eternal Father,
we thank you for nourishing us
with these heavenly gifts:
may our communion strengthen us in faith,
build us up in hope,
and make us grow in love;
for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Heavenly Father,
whose ascended Son gave gifts of leadership and service to the Church:
strengthen us who have received this holy food
to be good stewards of your manifold grace,
through him who came not to be served but to serve,
and give his life as a ransom for many,
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
God of truth,
help us to keep your law of love
and to walk in ways of wisdom,
that we may find true life
in Jesus Christ your Son.
Yesterday’s reflections
Continued tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition copyright © 2021, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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