If your worship this week includes Philippians 2: 1-11, here’s an approach you might want to consider. This dramatic reading uses a narrator (Paul) and four additional voices. It comes from Michael Perry’s The Dramatized New Testament (Baker Books, 1993), though the text here is from the NRSV.
For another approach to the reading of this text, see also Readers’ Theatre: Philippians 2: 1-13.
Dramatic Reading
(Philippians 2:1-11)
Paul: If there is any encouragement in Christ,
any consolation from love,
any sharing in the Spirit,
any compassion and sympathy,
make my joy complete:
be of the same mind,
having the same love,
being in full accord and of one mind.
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,
but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.
Let each of you look not to your own interests,
but to the interests of others.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.
1: Who, though we was in the form of God,
2: did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
1: And being found in human form,
2: he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death –
even death on a cross.
3: Therefore God also highly exalted him,
4: and gave him the name that is above every name,
3: so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
4: and every tongue should confess
1-4: that Jesus Christ is Lord,
4: to the glory of God the Father.
— as posted in Imitating Christ (Philippians 2) on the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship website.
For more worship resources related to this text, or other texts for September 25, 2011 (the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost), click on Proper 21A in the list of “Labels” at the lower right side of the page.
For other readers’ theatre settings of scripture, click on Readers’ theatre in the list of “Labels” at the right.
