(June 2026 Curry Rivel News)
Jacob, the man who encountered the holiness of God
Lester Amann considers the man who is our ‘spiritual father’…
Have you ever had a dramatic turning point in your life? Was there an incident, a meeting or something you saw or read which profoundly changed you? The Old Testament character Jacob had a dream, which changed his life.
One night, in the region of Luz, a Canaanite city, Jacob had a dream. He saw a ladder, on which were angels, linking earth with heaven. The dream revealed to him that God is continually connected with this world. When Jacob woke up, he knew he was in a special place. He became a changed man and changed the place name from Luz to Bethel, which means House of God. Many years later Jacob changed his name from Jacob to Israel. Bethel became a holy place.
How might we define a holy place? We could say it’s a place where God has touched earth with something of heaven e.g. with a miracle or a vision. Venues such as Lourdes (France), Lindisfarne (England), St Peter’s in Rome or Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre are considered Holy Places. The Garden of Gethsemane was a special place for Jesus.
Jacob certainly wasn’t faultless or impeccable. His encounter with God didn’t completely change the way he behaved, but it gave him a fresh perspective on life and where he fitted into God’s plans. Like Jacob we too may encounter God at a particular time and grow slowly with God and His plans for us. God doesn’t wait until we are perfect before He can use us. Sometimes we too may need a Holy Place to make or to return to, to help us remember we are in God’s hands.
Dear God, in my busy life, find for me a place where I can be still; a place to meet with You. I am weak and need your strength for each situation. Give me a holy place where I know your arms are embracing me, always safe and secure.
Amen.
From: The Parish Pump
(February 2026 Curry Rivel News)
Miracles
By Dr Ruth M Bancewicz, Church Engagement Director at The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge. She writes on the positive relationship between Science and Christian faith.
We live in a world where we can expect the sun to rise tomorrow and the milk to pour out of the bottle when we tilt it over our cereal. But for God, the properties of matter and the biological processes that we know and read about in text-books are simply the usual ways He works. If He chooses to do something unexpected to demonstrate something about His character, His relationship with us, and His purposes, then He will.
A group of 14 UK-based science Professors wrote to the Times in 1984, saying that “We gladly accept the Virgin Birth, the gospel miracles, and the Resurrection of Christ as historical events. We know that we are representative of many other scientists who are also Christians standing in the historical tradition of the churches.” For the non-believer, I would suggest a thought experiment: if God exists, why should He be bound by the same laws of physics as us?
Professor Christine Done is an Astrophysicist at the University of Durham. In the book True Scientists, True Faith’ (Monarch, 2014) she writes: “Even when I was an atheist I used to get cross at discussions…on how all Jesus’s miracles could be physically explained. To me, once you have believed in a God, a supernatural being, then it’s obvious that supernatural stuff could happen, since any God who can make the physical universe and its laws can presumably suspend those laws in any time and way He chooses.”
There are also miracles which appear to be a case of wonderful timing. The wind blew all night and the Israelites crossed the Red Sea on dry land, for example. The biblical writers don’t seem especially interested in distinguishing between wonders that seem to break the usual rules of how things happen and those that don’t.
Many in Jesus’ audiences were not won over by His wonders. Most of the people in the crowds who ate the food He produced out of nowhere were quite happy to turn on Him when the religious authorities decided He was dangerous.
We can only make sense of something unexpected, such as an answer to prayer for healing, in the context of a growing relationship with God. The exciting task for a Christian is to explain what this interaction looks like, and to demonstrate what ‘your kingdom come’ looks like in our communities. God works through us in words, works and wonders.
From: The Parish Pump
(January 2026 Curry Rivel News)
Epiphany!
By the Revd Roy Shaw, a retired but active priest in the diocese of York, where he is a spiritual director.
You probably know from tales of Greek mythology that gods and goddesses would often appear out of nowhere in ancient Greece to beguile or trick mortals. The word for this in everyday Greek was ‘epiphany’; - the appearance or manifestation of a divine being on earth to humans. For Christians Epiphany is the season after the 12 days of Christmas.
Our Epiphany Bible readings tell of the ‘manifestation’ of Jesus to a wider audience than those in the Christmas stories. We mark this in the first instance by placing the Wise Men in the crib scene; they have now arrived to see the consummation of their hopes and travels in the infant Jesus. And our Epiphany readings usually continue through the season with Jesus’ baptism; John the Baptist’s witness to Christ; Jesus’ family attempting to take charge of Him because of His popularity with the crowds; and the Presentation in the Temple. In all these, something of divine glory is being made manifest.
In more common parlance today, an epiphany means a sudden or blinding realisation (‘I had a sudden epiphany that John was going to marry Celia’). That modern meaning is helpful; ‘Gosh, epiphanies can be part of our Christian experience!’
Remember that occasion we were so conscious of God’s love holding us? Or the time we knew the words we used to that stranger were infused with a grace we didn’t know we had? These and similar experiences which we’ve probably all had can be seen as our epiphanies- a time when God was made manifest to us (and possibly through us) in a distinct w
Have you ever thought of those sorts of experiences as an epiphany? Not ring-fenced to a particular time of year, but part of our everyday experience, as we seek to live out our baptism promises, and follow Jesus through the ups and downs, the humdrum and the extraordinary, the joys and sorrows of the everyday.
The promise and reality of Christmas is ‘Emmanuel-God with us’. And the reality of Epiphany is that God IS with us, in the everyday realisation of how great God is, how much God loves us, and how God pours upon us grace after grace after grace.
May we have many epiphanies in 2026, and may they all bring us closer to the God who has chosen in His love to reveal Himself to us
From: The Parish Pump
(November 2025 Curry Rivel News)
Sacrifice
(From a previous ‘Scott’s Spot’)
As Remembrance Sunday approaches, we rightly turn our attention to remembering those who through their sacrifice ‘gave their tomorrows for our todays’. It is a time to remember the appalling cost of war in terms of front-line casualties, but also to remember the lasting repercussions endured by survivors or by those who lost loved ones. War, and the far reaching consequences that accompany it, needs to be remembered, not least when future conflict is considered.
This part of the year is also a time where we stand in awe of what human beings are capable of. When self-preservation may scream ‘run away,’ the accounts of bravery and self-sacrifice in war bring both admiration and that back of the mind nagging question: ‘what would I have done in their place?’
So for me, as a Christian minister, when I hear the account of Father Kolbe, the Polish Catholic Priest in Auschwitz, I ask myself that same question. The story goes that there had been a failed escape attempt, and the response of the Commandant was to pick ten men at random to be publically starved to death. As the victims were chosen, one man cried out “O no, my poor wife and children, what will they do without me?” On hearing this, Father Kolbe volunteered himself as a substitute for this family man and bravely faced that death himself. The manner of his eventual death is another story that you might like to look up sometime
There are of course a great many accounts along similar lines. Tremendous acts of bravery and self-giving that from the Flanders Fields of the First World War, to the deserts of Afghanistan, remind us that human beings are prepared to offer ‘their all’ in situations where the needs of those they love, or care for, are threatened
At this time of year there’s often a link made between the accounts of human self-sacrifice in times of war, and Jesus’ self-sacrificial death for us on the cross. As Jesus gave his life (paying for our sins) so that we might know life, the parallels seem obvious. But, it’s where the parallels break down, that we find something that lifts Jesus’ sacrifice into a league of its own. You see, as far as I can tell, the reasons that stand behind every act of human sacrifice that we remember this month, are rooted in the service of the deserving.
Father Kolbe gave his live for that family man; we hear of soldiers risking everything to carry wounded friends out of danger; the Battle of Britain pilots faced the odds they did in the service of our country and those they loved. What I’d like to challenge us with though, is the Bible’s teaching that when it came to Jesus’ self-giving sacrifice for us human beings, none of us were deserving. The Apostle Peter (1 Peter 3:18) wrote this: ‘Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous (Jesus) for (us) the unrighteous’.
That we could even go as far as saying that the Son of God choose to die for those who considered him their enemy, is what lifts his sacrifice into a class of its own.
To me, the choice to die for enemies is what lifts the Christian gospel from the level of merely human thought, to the majesty of divine grace.
With every blessing, Revd. Scott Patterson
(September 2025 Curry Rivel News - From The Parish Pump)
New beginnings by Canon Paul Hardingham
September is the time of year when we get back to our routines after the summer break. As whole-life disciples (literally: learners) we are all called to learn from Jesus and live like Him. God wants us to make a difference in our workplaces and schools, and with family and friends. As Paul writes:
‘And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.’ (Colossians 3:17).
‘WHATEVER you do’: God is at work in every aspect of our lives. He can use whatever we do to make a difference to those around. Do we believe this? Our lives shouldn’t be like an orange, segmented into the sacred and secular, but more like an apple, in which all of our lives are available to Him.
‘Whatever YOU do’: God wants to use us to share God’s love as we serve others around us, wherever we spend time. We can trust Him for the resources we need hour by hour, day by day, year by year. What do we need from Him?
‘Whatever you DO’: We work for God alone, in responding to God’s love for us. How does this perspective make a difference when what we do is hard, unrewarding, or even unappreciated by others?
A man standing on a train platform was asked one day: ‘Who are you?’ He replied, ‘I am a Christian thinly disguised as an accountant.’ If we were asked the same question ourselves, how would we respond? As disciples of Jesus Christ, our identity is rooted in God and His call upon our lives. For each of us, September means learning from Jesus about how we might live for Him in the different places we find ourselves.