Prophetic Preaching in the Postmodern Times

With worldwide information on the tips of human fingers, global facts, awareness, and information—at their worst and best—is just a click away. A challenge (and temptation) to contemporary preachers are always present. It is easy to use electronic scissors and pastes to create messages for the hungering congregants. But I always believe that preaching is more than presenting facts and updates. Preaching is a means to assist the listener experience Jesus Christ and find meaning in their existence and community value. To this, I find the prophetic materials fascinating in dealing with current issues similar to our times, i.e. superficial religiosity, injustice, societal evils and the like. While any preacher today is dealing with the contemporary issues, it is also valuable to utilize not only the prophetic materials in the Bible but to keep one’s self updated with the global picture of the trend of times. In that way, prophetic preaching can address—and even confront—not only the need of the church community but to keep them conscious about the picture as a whole. After all, the prophets of old addressed domestic and international issues that threaten the relationship of God’s people with their God.

Complexities are part of human nature. Preaching can do away with superficial simplicity synonymous with mediocrity. Oral communication of divine words is hard to imagine to be handled in contemptuous familiarity. The poetic structures—now on their literary forms—conveys a profound treatment of obvious, but taken for granted, concerns for the community of God. In a creative and innovative—sometimes radical—ways, the prophet of God conveys the message with clear purpose and meaning. The motivation is always the centrality of God, but the methods vary. Modern prophetic preaching can employ complex poetic structure, narrative exposition, modern parables, and shocking funeral dirge, but his biblical material suggests more than that. Prophetic preaching has to deal with the vacuum created by postmodern skepticism on absolutes. While God is absolute and thus “relativizing” everything other than himself, nonnegotiable essentials of faith must be communicated with conviction and passion in accordance to the context of the listener and recipient. It is the modern preacher’s challenge to convey that “godliness in Christ” is an absolute demand that cannot be compromised.

Almost in every culture, the messenger of divine words has authority in his own right. Through personal conviction, the messenger stands, whether his authority is challenged or acknowledged, in the community. But the Christian witness on a certain community cannot do away with his divine calling in addressing human needs and not just presentation of eternal ideas. God is disclosed before the people through imaginative ways. It’s more than “tell me what you know” but also of “tell me what you do.” In that may, the people may see that we really understand what we know; and it is not just in the mind, but also in the heart. A prophet may not be perfect but his call demands a higher standard of life, integrity, and purity. They may be ordinary people in the community, but it is certain that they are not unconscious about their purpose and message. Thus, prophetic preaching is not just about words and articulation of the message; it is accompanied with lifestyle. It addresses current issues and concerns, but its ancient text is always on hand ready to answer those who are asking for the hope that is in us.

Prophetic preaching, therefore, is a potential ministry in postmodern times. It is not threatened with pessimistic disillusionment and relativism of everything. After all, deconstruction is not absolute in itself.