community

Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity: Lauren F. Winner

For most of human history, people of many different cultures have agreed that societies must order certain forms of exchange in order to survive. Communities have ordered language, establishing grammars nad vocabularies that shape how people comunicate with one another; they have ordered the exchange of money, property, and labor; and they have ordered the practice of sex. As essayist, poet, and novelist Wendell Berry has put it, "sex, like any other necessary, precarious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody's business." In the last half-century, however, that assumption has been routed, replaced by the axioms of individualism and autonomy. Indeed, today the idea that sex "is everybody's business" sounds alternately shocking and silly...

...But in the Christian universe, the individual is not the vital unit of ethical meaning. For Christians, the most basic images, metaphors, and signs are corporate, and the basic unit of ethical meaning is the Body, the comunity. Israel experiences covenantal fidelity as a people, and the People of God is a collective- not merely an aggregate of individual persons, each doing his or her own thing, but a body. In the Bible, God elects the People of Israel as a body. He sustains them as a body. And, finally, He redeems them as a body. This talk about community is not metaphorizing. The community has a role i making ethics. Paul makes this clear when he instructs the Galatians to hold one another accountable for sin: "Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ."

That passage in Galatians, if we construe it uncharitably, can lead us to envision a community that functions primarily as a police force: Christinas' responsibilities to one another begin and end with peering into other Christians' bedroom windows and sounding the alarm if something illicit is going on.

While one task of any community is to enforce its own codes when they are being violated, perhaps the prior task of the community is to make sense of the ethical codes that are being enforced. Here the community is not so much a cop as storyteller, telling and retelling the foundational stories of the community itself, sustaining the stories that make sense of the community's norms. This storytelling is part of hte working out of God's grace in the church. we, teh church, retell our own story- we do this every time we read scripture, every time we celebrate the Lord's Supper, and every time we minister to one another. And that reteling is part of what enables us to live into the story. It is the community that ensures that ethics is not about the dispensing of cut-and-dried answers to moral questions, but that ethics is the story with meaning and power.