Simon Camilleri is so keen on memorising the Bible and speaking it, or reading it aloud ,that he uses a really unusual metaphor.
“There is something so wonderful about committing God’s word to heart and letting it soak in you so that, it becomes like something you’ve marinated in, you know, like a piece of meat that’s been marinating in a sauce for, for days, it feels like that gets inside you,” he tells The Other Cheek. “It’s not just a cerebral memorisation of words. It’s something that soaks deep inside you.”
“Then to share that with people and let them experience it too, is absolutely…” Camilleri has to pause. “It’s very hard to put into words. I’ve had grown men weeping at the end of a presentation. I’ve had people engage with the Bible in even if they’ve been studying it for years and years and years. There’s something about listening to the Bible being spoken to us, whether it be read from a piece of paper, or be committed to memory and then spoken out loud.”
Camilleri is on a mission to get Christians to take reading (and reciting) the Bible aloud to heart.
Here’s how his tour to Sydney performing John 17 to 20 affected one audience member. “It includes the scene at the tomb, where Mary Magdalene is weeping. Because she thinks they’ve taken the Lord’s body away and she doesn’t know where it is.
“After that performance, a lady came up to me and said, ‘I so connected with that moment, because my sister went missing many years ago. And we’ve never, we never found the body. And the grief of not knowing where the body is so deep.” So in just that little moment, God wanted to minister to someone. And I’m sure she has read that passage hundreds of times and heard it read hundreds of times over the years.”
So you’re on a Bible reading roster
Camilleri wants to be practical, he knows that sometimes you might not find out the reading until a couple of days before. But he urges you to get to know the reading so well that you can say – as he often does – “It is my joy to read this Bible passage to you today.”
He suggests you begin by printing it out in a format you are comfortable with, whether your are reading it, or memorising it to perform.
“Because the more time you give it, the more familiar you get to be with the text and so you’re not reading it with that sort of stumbling ‘I’m still getting to know this text tone’ which I think is familiar with too many readers who read that way. And you can tell they don’t really know the text. But if you can, the more time you have, the more you can move from just getting familiar with the text to actually getting a bit deeper and feeling a connection with the text.”
He wants you to fall in love with the text, looking forward to people hearing it from you. They will hear a story as though they are hearing it from an eyewitness, a letter as though it is freshly written. “We are all storytellers. Because the gospel is the story of something that has happened, good news about something that has happened in history.”
From playwright to Bible performer
Simon Camilleri discovered the power of the Word committed to memory and performed twenty years ago as a student at Latrobe university. He was a keen actor and playwright and longed to be more overly Christian as a writer. “I tried to write and direct plays and I put on a few but I was really appealing to the, the arty, farty crowd, everything was a bit subtle, and you want people to like it, and you try and be edgy and a bit different and stuff.”
It wasn’t working. “I remember thinking, I feel like I’m the parable of the sower. But instead of just throwing the seed out and letting it fall in different soils, I was trying to analyse the soil and whittle down the seed to fit.”
“So I thought, Okay, well, I’ll do a play on the stories of the Gospels. And then immediately, I thought, how on earth can I do that without looking terrible and dare ye and said, millions of men with tea towels wrapped around their hands and cardboard, cut out sheep, and I couldn’t see how could be doesn’t really well. Then around the same time, I heard Max Mclean, who was going around America performing the entire Gospel of Mark And I was blown away by the concept.
“I remember going back to the Gospel of Mark, and just reading the opening paragraph, not as a as a source that I could then write something creative about, but as the finished script. It was like scales fell from my eyes. Because the opening says, ‘In the beginning, the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written on Isaiah the prophet I send my messenger ahead of you, who prepare your way.’ Like, it sounded like the beginning of Lord of the Rings. It sounds like this, the beginning of this epic movie. And I realised I didn’t need to think of the Bible as just this sort of boring, lifeless thing that I need to use in order to make something amazing and passionate: that I can just read the text that was there.”
He gathered a group of 12 players and they divided the text between them, putting it on as a play on the Latrobe campus. They charged $5, and soon were turning away 60 people a night because the theatre was full.
For Camilleri, it was a life changer.
So you read the Bible in Church and you are not sure you are very good at it?
Here are Camilleri’s tips. “It is a craft.” (so it has to be learned.) “So I would encourage you to read your passage, read it a gain (and again), and read it to others and be willing to take their feedback about how you read, how well you read and how you can improve your reading.”
And here’s what he’d like to say to churches: “We don’t train our Bible readers, and we don’t give them feedback. It’s like we think if they’ve read the words accurately, that’s all we need them to do. So I want to encourage churches to think more highly of Bible reading as a ministry, not just a roster and to provide encouragement and support for the Bible readers and training if possible.”