Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and this week began with the Fifth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity V, 5 July 2026). Later this evening, I hope to take part in the rehearsals in Saint Mary and Saint Giles for the service next Monday welcoming the new Rector of Stony Stratford, the Revd Dr David Jarratt.
But, 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 10: 16-23 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 16 ‘See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. 17 Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; 18 and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. 19 When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; 20 for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. 21 Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; 22 and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. 23 When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.’
Today’s Reflections:
The Gospel reading at the Eucharist today (Matthew 10: 16-23) continues yesterday’s account of the commission and mission of the Twelve (Matthew 10: 7-15), as the Twelve continue to receive are given their instructions and commission for mission among the ‘lost sheep’: they are going out like sheep into the midst of wolves, so they need to be wise ‘as serpents and innocent as doves’ and to be aware of the threats and dangers they face.
The image of wolves in sheep’s clothing may lead us to ask how we recognise wolves in sheep clothing or false prophets who hijack abuse the name of Christ and Christianity today?
I hope I never get use to the blasphemous obscenities and images that come from Donald Trump. When he speaks he is often 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, who is a member of the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship and who claims God blesses his war-mongering, his violence, his genocide, and invoking God to sanction his evil actions.
Let me offer four 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 once made a video that purported to be an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which the politician appeared to give bizarre answers to 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 (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.’ Last 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 – is Trump’s ambassador to Israel. He is an ordained Baptist minister, but has also been the Governor of Arkansas (1996-2007), and has hosted a talk show on Fox News. 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 – was arrested in connection with the killing of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband and the shooting of a state senator and his wife last year (14 June 2025). 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 pleaded guilty to 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.
He is due to be sentenced later this month (23 July 2026), when he faces two consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, plus 40 years.
To this day, Trump has had neither the courtesy nor the courage to pick up the phone and offer words of consolation and assurance to these three politicians or anyone else named on Boetler’s hit list. Then, on the other hand, perhaps it is no small mercy that he has not managed to shift the blame onto migrants or refugees, yet.
Q, Wolf or Sheep? True prophet or false?
We are sent out like sheep among wolves. We are, in a way, defenceless, because we renounce any use of violence. There are wolves out there eager to destroy us because, despite our message of love, justice and peace, we are seen as a threat to their activities and ambitions.
We are to be as wise as snakes and innocent as doves. We are to be as inventive and creative as we can be in dealing with the world. But we are to be innocent, not in the sense of being naive, but in the sense of being completely free of even any suspicion of wrongdoing. The ends do not justify the means.
At every Eucharist, we hear that Jesus in his Body is handed over to us: ‘This is my Body, which is given up for you.’
When we are handed over we are not to be anxious about what to say. The enemies of the Gospel do not have the final answer when it comes to truth, love and justice.
Of course, Jesus never calls on us to go out of our way to seek persecution or to be hated, and we are to make Christianity as attractive as possible. But Christianity and the values of the Kingdom are being traduced, supposedly in the name of Christ, by key people at the very heart of political life in the US today.
Has the time come when true Christians can run no further, or when it is clear we have to take a stand and cannot compromise? We need to know the sheep from the wolves, to be in some way as wise as serpents and innocent as doves, to be assured also of the promise that those who endure to the end will be saved.
Today’s Prayers (Friday 10 July 2026):
In Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the theme this week, from 5 to 11 July 2026 (pp 16-17), is ‘Faith in the Midst of Fractures’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with a reflection by the Revd Godfrey Owino Adera, Anglican priest, theologian, and lecturer at Saint Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya.
The USPG prayer diary today (Friday 10 July 2026) invites us to pray:
Faithful God, we give thanks for the FeAST network and the way it nurtures learning, friendship, and justice-oriented theology. Bless the network with deepened relationships, shared vision, and long-lasting fruit that glorifies your name.
The Collect of the Day:
Almighty and everlasting God,
by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church
is governed and sanctified:
hear our prayer which we offer for all your faithful people,
that in their vocation and ministry
they may serve you in holiness and truth
to the glory of your name;
through our Lord and 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:
Grant, O Lord, we beseech you,
that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered
by your governance,
that your Church may joyfully serve you in all godly quietness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Almighty God,
send down upon your Church
the riches of your Spirit,
and kindle in all who minister the gospel
your countless gifts of grace;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s reflections
Continued tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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