THE IMPORTANCE OF INTANGIBLES

2 Corinthians 3:18-4:18

To introduce our study, I want to share two seemingly unrelated anecdotes.

The first incident took place in Texas during the fifties. One of the most influential persons during my years of adolescence was an English teacher named, Ione McIntyre. "Miss Mac" was tiny spinster with a passion for grammar and English literature. She taught me to conjugate verbs, to distinguish between a predicate nominative and a direct object, and to parse sentences. She deplored the use of "ain't," split infinitives, and using "them" as a possessive pronoun (as in "Please pass them biscuits"). With a classroom full of sharecroppers' sons and West Texas cowboys, she took on an enormous challenge. She also introduced us to Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning and Tennyson.

"Miss Mac" was a Christian and didn't worry too much about the consequences of imparting moral and spiritual values to her students. It wasn't a touchy issue in those day. One day she told the class, "There are two kinds of reality. First, there is tangible reality. Tangible reality consists of the things we perceive through the five senses - touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. There is, however, another form of reality. It consists of intangibles. Intangibles are beyond the realm of the five senses. They include things like love, hope, joy, peace and freedom. You must understand that intangible are just as real as the tangibles."

The second incident occurred in Wisconsin in the nineties. Between the towns of Sparta and Black River Falls, there's an remarkable acreage along the banks of Robinson Creek, known as Fallhall Glen. The Wisconsin Christian Youth Camp has a facility there. Every year, they open their doors to a group of ministers just as the leaves of the maple trees begin to turn brown, yellow and red. For three days, those who gather at Fallhall Glen study, pray and visit together. It is always an uplifting experience. Once I rode to the retreat with two other ministers. On our way home, we stopped off at a restaurant and I noticed the headlines of USA Today as we went inside. The headlines screamed messages about human cruelty, violence, corruption and concerns for the economy. I turned to one of my friends and said, "Well, I guess we have to go back to the real world." He said "No, that's the real world, we've been focusing on." Pointing to the newspaper, he said, "That's the illusion."

Christians are sometimes accused of attempting to retreat from reality. We're focused on a "land that is fairer than day" and thus we don't develop the necessary skills to cope with life's real problems. We're portrayed as human weaklings, who lean on faith as a crutch because we lack the strength to face the real world. To the skeptic, the real world consists of those things which have monetary value, commodities that can be bought sold or traded and tangibles which can be weighed, measured, counted, calibrated or metered. According to another version, the real world is the place where such things as sexual permissiveness, drug use, cheating, drunkenness and twisting the rules of ethics are commonplace. To hear them tell it, intangibles don't exist.

I'm convinced Miss Mac had it right to begin with. Paul would not only agree with her, he would go her one better. He would say in 2 Corinthians 4:18 "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." As Paul saw it, the tangibles are temporary; the intangibles are permanent. So which one belongs to the real world? Peter spoke of a day when ". . . the elements will melt in the heat" (2 Peter 3:13). Does that not suggest the temporary nature of all physical reality as we know it?

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