The scriptures for this sermon are:

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

These can be read be clicking here.

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As an undergraduate in college I was a student of psychology,
and for awhile I considered entering into the counseling profession.
One of the things you learn early on if you are going to be a counselor of any kind is to maintain a distance from the person you are counseling.
A counselor needs to be close enough to the counselee to care,
and yet he or she must also be distant enough to be objective -
to dispassionately consider and reflect upon what the counselee says.
It is called professional distance.

One of the reasons I chose not to pursue counseling was the fact that I have never been very good at keeping a professional distance from people I really care about.
If I care enough about a person to listen to his troubles,
if I am going to take the time to consider the issues and concerns he or she has,
then I find it very hard not to offer them my own thoughts and advice on what they are going through.
I find it hard to keep my distance.

Distance versus nearness.
Or to put it into theological terms for this Trinity Sunday,
we can talk about the distance, the transcendence of God versus the nearness immanence of God.
Is God a God who is transcendent and above us, needing nothing and no one,
or is God a God who draws close to us and shares in our lives.

At the risk of losing you this early in the sermon,
I’m going to be up front with you this morning and tell you that my message today is about the Trinity and therefore it is about God.
I am going to use a few theological terms and talk about doctrine,
and I am also going to bring up two guys from the 4th century,
men who, over 1600 years ago, struggled with the idea of who God is.

Today is Trinity Sunday,
the only Sunday of the year devoted to a doctrinal teaching of the Church.
Simply put the doctrine of the Trinity states that the one God we worship is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This, of course, seems like a mystery of mathematics.
How can one God really be three beings?
It can a difficult concept to wrap our minds around.
The English preacher, Colin Morris, says that any preacher with good sense will call in sick on Trinity Sunday.
I wish I had thought of that.
Another Englishman, John Wesley,
the founder of the Methodist Church, once said,
“Show me a worm that can comprehend a human being,
and then I will show you a human being that can comprehend the Triune God.”
And one of Martin Luther’s comments was even more to the point.
“To try to deny the Trinity endangers your salvation;
but to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers your sanity.”

Now in case these quotes are a little too academic,
let me quote from the 1990 classic movie Nuns on the Run,
which starred, among others, the Monty Python alum Eric Idle.
Idle is playing a character named Brian Hope,
who is talking to his partner in crime, named Charlie McManus.
Brian and Charlie are in hiding after stealing some money from the mob,
and in order to disguise themselves,
they have donned the habits of nuns and taken up residence in a nunnery.
For some reason their conversation turns to theology.

Brian says to Charlie: Explain the Trinity.
Charlie: Hmmm… well, it’s a bit of a bugger.
Well, you’ve got the Father, the Son and the holy ghost.
But the three are one – like a shamrock,
my old priest used to say. “Three leaves, but one leaf.”
Now, the father sent down the son, who was love,
and then when he went away, he sent down the holy spirit,
who came down in the form of a…

Brian: You told me already – a ghost.
Charlie: No, a dove.
Brian: The dove was a ghost?
Charlie: No, the ghost was a dove.
Brian: Let me try and summarize this:
God is his son.
And his son is God.
But his son moonlights as a holy ghost, a holy spirit, and a dove.
And they all send each other,
even though they’re all one and the same thing.
Charlie: You’ve got it. You really could be a nun!

Now do you understand the Trinity?
And though some of you are shaking your heads no,
I am going out on a limb and tell you that of course you understand the trinity,
but not because of theological definitions and quotes.
You understand the trinity because when it all is said and done the doctrine of the trinity is all about wondering who and what God is and how it stands between this God and you as you live your life.

The ancient Hebrews once asked this question in their scriptures:
Is the Lord among us or not?
And I am willing to bet that this is a question everyone here has asked at one time or another.
Is God , is the Lord of the universe, really real?
Can this almighty creator and Lord be a part of my life?
Does God even know who I am and does he care about the troubles I go through and the problems I face?
And will God help me get through this life that I am living or not?

In the fourth century two old codgers named Arius and Athanaius argued about these questions and their answers.
And in particular they argued over who Jesus was.
For Arius the idea that Jesus was God was too much.
The idea that God could be found in a human being was ridiculous.
After all, God is God because God can never be fully understood or communicated.
Divinity, Arius argued, is self-contained,
fully complete within itself.
Any God worth his salt needs nothing and no one to complete his god-ness.
God is self-sufficient,
and has no need to be in a relationship or extend himself to others,
let alone to the likes of us.

Arius rejected the notion that a being so exalted and self-contained as God would ever involve himself with his creatures.
For God to come down to our level would mean he would have to dirty his purity and holiness.
For Arius God, the great God on high,
is not dependent in any way on us.
After all, who wants a God who is so weak as to need us for anything?

Athanasius, of course, felt differently.
For Athanasius, Jesus was God in flesh and blood.
For him, God showed how God-like he was,
not by staying removed from our day to day lives and existence,
but by joining us in the muck and mud of living life.
This is a God who would get his hands dirty by being born in a barn, of all places,
whose cradle was a feeding trough,
and who lived his life with perfectly ordinary people like you and me.
This a God whose primary characteristic is not distance, but nearness.
A God who is always and everywhere self-giving –
This is true when he gives us the wonder of creation and puts its care in our hands as he does in Psalm 8,
It is true when he as wisdom enters into the fray of this world:
On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
and at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
“To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
The nearness of God is seen in the gospel for today when Jesus says for us all to hear:  All that the Father has is mine.
And we see how closely God wants to be involved in our lives when Paul writes those beautiful verses to the Romans:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand;
and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings,
knowing that suffering produces endurance,
and endurance produces charact

er,
and character produces hope,
and hope does not disappoint us,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Did you hear that last part?
Let me say it again in case you didn’t:
and hope does not disappoint us,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

And all of this is what we try to convey when we try to define the term Trinity.
Maybe a story will tell you what a mean a little better.
Delores Williams, an instructor of mine at Drew University,
told us a little about her childhood in a class I had with her on the religious experience of Black women.
Delores grew up in Louisville, Kentucky
(a fact that endears her to the heart of this native Kentuckian),
and she spoke of attending church on Sunday morning.
It seems that every Sunday morning the pastor of the church would ascend to the pulpit after the prayers and the singing and just before he would start to preach. 
He would turn to the choir and ask them the question -
“Who do you say God is?” 
The choir would answer him by singing loudly and with much power -”God of Gods, King of Kings, and Father Everlasting.” 

The minister would then turn to the congregation and ask –
“Who do you say God is?” 
At that moment, little Adie Duff,
the oldest member of the congregation would stand and sing in her now weak and cracking voice
“Poor Mary’s little boy, and they hung him on a tree,
and they hung him on a tree.”

The Minister would again ask the question to the choir and they would once again repeat their refrain:
“God of Gods, King of Kings, and Father everlasting.  
Adie Duff would then reply,
“Poor Mary’s little boy and she laid him in the grave,
and she laid him in the grave.

Once more the minister would fervently ask the Choir
“Who do you say God is?” 
And they would reply in their mighty chorus,
“God of Gods, King of Kings, and Father everlasting.”
and then the reply from Adie Duff would be
“Poor Mary’s little boy and he got up from the dead,
and he got up from the dead.” 

Now the point of this exercise was not to put one aspect of God over the other,
because God’s nature is found in both Adie Duff’s and the Choir’s description.
The point of it all was to celebrate the different ways that God has appeared to us. 
Yes, God is God of all, King of kings, Father Everlasting. 
Yes, God has appeared in the burning bush to Moses.
As a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day leading the Israelites through the desert. 
Yes, God is the kind of God to command respect,
Yes, God is to be held in awe and worshipped and praised.
Yes, God is the Almighty One spoke of in the Old Testament. 
But there is more.  So much more.

God is also the small child that Mary holds in her arms on Christmas night. 
God is the one who is incarnate in Jesus Christ. 
God was found most perfectly in a human being,
a man named Jesus,
from the village called Nazareth.
It is this belief that makes us Christian. 
God became human and lived with us. 
God did not stay hidden from us,
God is not merely transcendent,
and God is not distant from us.
Rather our God, our triune God, freely, out of love, 
burst into our world,
and revealed himself to us in the visible,
most human form, of Jesus of Nazareth. 
And now, through his Spirit,
through the Holy Spirit,
God would dwell within each and every one of us.

Rather than being self-contained and independent from us,
God is all about self-giving and love,
and you can’t love another without being connected to that person.

One preacher has said,
We are often like Arius.
Our God is distant, high and lifted up,
not a god who dirties his hands in our affairs.
Our God is exalted, honored, high -
even if we have to nail him up there ourselves.
And we did.
We nailed him up there only to have him say,
“And when I am lifted up (surprise!),
I will draw all people to myself.”

Here is a God who is always willing to stoop,
a God who welcomes and even seeks our prayers and praise,
our good deeds and our, yes, even our sin.

God’s greatest “godness” is that God is so close to us,
that he is so self-giving,
that he holds nothing back,
and that he offers us everything we could ever need.
This is why we can say with the Psalmist,
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

This sermon owes some of its ideas and content to William Willimon’s work “The Trinity: God’s Unprofessional Nearness” found in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 23, No. 2.