As a lay reader, ultimate humility comes in realizing that the reading is not about you. You’re there to serve as the catalyst between members of the congregation and their own encounters with scripture.

The reading is not about your skills or issues. It’s about experiences pertaining to the human condition as a whole, illuminated by the struggles and triumphs of lives lived and recounted in the Bible.  It’s our role as readers to give life to and present the struggles and triumphs of others as part of a shared experience.

I’m disappointed when the readings are introduced as “lessons.”  As if the only purpose of any reading is to convey a moral, it’s often perceived that our job as readers is to serve as instructional assistants, presenting a use case for moralizing.

Reading aloud is not about oral interpretation in the sense that we are invited to impose our own interpretation on what we are reading. We are not offering our own characterizations or moral judgements on the behavior of other individuals. It’s not about midrash or exegesis of the text: leave that to scholars and ministers.

What the Lay Reader of scripture offers is an opportunity for the congregation to encounter and experience scripture. These are words that we bring to life, from which we receive life, and through which we experience what it means to live, to really live, to live fully. We don’t read to impose meaning, or evince rules, we read to give a voice to the experience of lives lived in a world inhabited by the living God, infused with the holy spirit —lives lived with God, and in the case of the Gospels, through Jesus Christ.

Many readers are worried about sounding to “actor-ish.” They feel safer reading in a dispassionate, flat, “just the facts, Ma’m” police report voice. This approach drains life from the reading rather than giving it life. The Bible is not for the dead. It is for the living: the newly born and baptized, the reborn and the resurrected and anyone else with ears to hear.

So, it’s not about acting in the theatrical sense. Reading scripture is not about assuming character roles. Have you noticed how in nearly every Bible film or television spectacular, everyone in the holy land speaks with a British accent? Why is that? (Apparently, the disciples were not recruited from along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, but from up in and around the Lake District in the north of England.) We’re not here to do character voices. It’s not about characters. It’s about human relationships and emotion; being called and attempting to answer that call; it’s about human beings wrestling with the inertia of the physical universe and breaking the bonds of human traditions that have lost their usefulness. It’s about encounters with good and evil. It’s not about character. It’s about charisma.

We are not called as readers to deliver a dispassionate recitation of case law, to provide a lesson, or revel in a nostalgic recounting of events that happened “long ago and far away…”

These are words that are meant to be on our tongues and filling our mouths. We are meant to bring them to life.

It is not about you. It’s about the word of God for the people of God.