Once upon a time there was a catfish. It was the biggest catfish I ever saw. It lived in a small pond on a small farm located a small distance north of the small town in Kansas where we lived. The farm was owned by two of my friends, John and Carrol. The pond, as I said, was small: I suppose it was 25 feet long and maybe a dozen feet across, and 8 feet deep. John had caught this catfish in the river many years ago. He had kept it alive and transferred it to this pond, and he fed it every day, and it kept on growing. He named it Sweetums.

And I guess Sweetums had a pretty good life. For a catfish. The food showed up each day, about dusk, a coffee can’s worth of Purina catfish chow. I was there, one evening when Sweetums got fed. John poured some of those fish pellets out in to the palm of his hand, and scattered them out across the water. And Whoosh! – this tidal wave of motion, as the shoulders of this enormous tomcat of a catfish broke the surface: Sweetums surging from one side of the pond to the other and back again, sucking fish chow out of the water.

“She doesn’t always do that,” John explained to me. “Later in the summer she gets lazy, and she just waits until the food gets all soggy and sinks, and then she eats it off the bottom.” I felt kind of grateful that I had the chance to see her in action.

I report to you, however, that impressive as that moment was, I did not feel a great longing in my heart to be able to trade places with Sweetums. In the comparison between the life of a fat catfish and the life of a child of God, it seemed to me then, and still does, that the life of a child of God would be preferable. Sweetums was the exemplar of a big fish in a small pond, the unchallenged master of her realm; but I still did not want to swap.

From the perspective of a catfish, I suppose Sweetums’ life must have seemed pretty simple and straightforward and good. The food simply is there. I’d guess it would never enter the mind of a fat catfish to wonder, “Where does the food come from?” I’d guess it would never enter the mind of a fat catfish to imagine, “There must be something like a great caretaker fish that lives up above the water, a Great Catfish in the Sky, who provides this food for me every day.” I’d guess it would never enter the mind of a fat catfish in a pond to ponder on questions like “Why is the world arranged this way?” or “Why am I here?” or “What would happen if someday the food were not there?”

But for us, the children of God, it isn’t that way. God has placed us in a world where our sustenance is not automatically taken care of. God has placed us in a world in which good things don’t always happen: in a world where our nourishment is not guaranteed: in a world where things often go wrong. And we take this reality as the basis for a complaint. “If God were truly a God of love,” we say to ourselves, “wouldn’t he arrange things so that hunger and suffering would never arise?”

Although God often gets the blame for everything that goes wrong, we should recognize that many of the painful things that happen are the result of our own actions. We have been entrusted with God’s great gift of freedom, and we use that freedom badly. Because it’s real freedom, it has real consequence: and so when we misuse our freedom and harm others, they do get harmed. It’s this way with all the gifts God has entrusted to us. We are stewards, or trustees, of these things, and when we fail in our stewardship, people are harmed. The reality of being a steward of God’s gifts means that people will always be harmed, until we learn to do the job well. May God grant us grace to be diligent stewards, and to use well the gifts entrusted to us, so that we may use them to create blessing and joy and reconciliation, rather than destruction and harm.

But if that’s an explanation of some of the way things go wrong in this world, it’s still not an explanation of the whole thing. If Uncle Mort spits out his angry cutting words at Aunt Matilda – if he fails to use the freedom God has entrusted to him to bless Matilda, if he fails in the stewardship of the gifts God gives him – then that explains the hurt in Matilda’s heart. But what about the more extensive and widespread pains in the world: like cancer, and earthquakes, and drought? Maybe some of the explanation can still be laid at our door: maybe some of the cancer in the world is caused by the greed of tobacco companies, maybe some of the hunger in various nations is caused by the gluttony of other nations. But even when you make every allowance for how human choices cause unhappy consequences, you still end up with this residue of disaster and distress that doesn’t seem to be explainable by human choice. Why should there be cancer at all? Why should there be earthquakes or floods at all?

If God is running the world, why should there be such painful disasters as these, where it clearly is not the fault of any human being? Blame as much of the pain in the world as you can on the consequences of human choices – clumsy and inept choices, sometimes, or wicked and sinful choices, sometimes – and you’re still left with the question as to why God allows this world to keep on with this surprising amount of sorrow and suffering.

It is one of the most provoking questions in the Christian faith. None of us has a fully satisfying answer. We do see at least a bit of a clue, however, here at the beginning of II Corinthians. And perhaps the place to begin the exposition is by saying this: God is not following the Fat Catfish Model of how to run the universe.

Let me say that again. God is not following the Fat Catfish Model of how to run the universe. Instead, God is following the Children-of-God model of how to run the universe. Yet sometimes we seem to suppose that God ought to be following the Fat Catfish Model: as if we had indeed traded places with Sweetums, as if it is God’s job to make sure that everything we need shows up on time, with little effort on our part: with the result that it hardly matters whether we wonder if there is Someone Up There who makes it happen, or whether we take for granted what’s in front of us. We often live as if it’s God’s job to make sure that there is no trial or trauma in our lives. We live as if it’s God’s job to run the universe in such a way that we can get along quite well, without ever even having to think about God: so that we can live our Fat Catfish lives in comfort, with everything we need showing up, automatically, on schedule.

But God is not following the Fat Catfish model of how to run the universe. Instead, God is following the Children-of-God model. And that means that we must learn, and grow, like children. Like children, we are on the way to becoming what we will be when we grow up. One of the things about being a child is that you don’t start out already knowing everything you’ll need to know as you grow up. And so you have to learn.

In a Fat Catfish world, where Sweetums had ended up, you don’t need to learn how to find food. The food just shows up. In a Fat Catfish world, you don’t need to learn how to avoid dangers. There are no dangers. In a Fat Catfish world, you don’t need to learn how to make good choices. There are no choices, good or bad, to make. But if you haven’t swapped places with Sweetums, if you don’t live in a Fat Catfish world, then you’re going to have to learn a lot of things as you go along.

And how will you learn? Some of what you’ll learn, you’ll learn from being in a world where suffering takes place. Because it is only in a real world like this one – and not in a Fat Catfish world – that we can learn to be people of compassion.

Listen again to the words of this morning’s reading:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort, too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort (II Corinthians 1:3-7).

It’s hard to avoid noticing the word comfort here, isn’t it? The root meaning of the word is “coming alongside.” In the ancient world the term was used to refer to someone coming alongside you in two different situations. The first one was, if your heart was broken with sorrow, a friend might come alongside you, put an arm around your shoulders, to comfort you. The second one was, if you were accused of something in a court of law, a friend might come alongside you to plead your case, to advocate on your behalf.

This same root word is used in the gospel of John to talk about the Holy Spirit. Depending on what translation you are using, the term gets translated as Comforter or as Advocate or Counselor. Thus some translations end up emphasizing that the Holy Spirit comes alongside us to comfort us in our affliction, while others end up emphasizing that the Holy Spirit comes alongside us to counsel us or to advocate on our behalf. Both translations are right. That root word is rich and full of meaning: the Holy Spirit, whom John further identifies as the presence of the Father and the Son making their home with us – the Holy Spirit comes alongside us as Comforter and Counselor and Advocate.

And in his second letter to the Corinthians, in our reading this morning, Paul used the same root word to describe the action that God works in us, and then through us. It is the ministry of God the Comforter, the ministry of God who comes alongside us to comfort us in our affliction. It is the ministry of God the Counselor, the ministry of God who comes alongside us to counsel or teach us to comfort others with the same comfort with which we ourselves have been comforted.

There are more than two aspects to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, but these two aspects are highlighted in this passage. Part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit is this: to comfort us, to comfort us in every affliction, to come alongside us and hold us with the love of God, so that somehow, mysteriously, we feel the closeness of God’s presence. And another part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit is this: to teach us, to counsel us, to urge us, to “go thou and do likewise.” The Holy Spirit comforts us in every affliction, so that we can be the children of God who have learned how to comfort others in their affliction: so that we can come alongside the way God does, because we are the children of God.

We are the children of the God who comes alongside us. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all coming-alongside-ness, who comes alongside us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to come alongside those who are in any affliction with the same coming-alongside-ness with which we ourselves have been come alongside of by God.

Our Lord is not following the Fat Catfish model. God is instead following the Children-of-God model for how to run the universe. And because of that, God does not give us a Fat Catfish world, a world designed for our convenience, where everything comes to us automatically. Instead, we get a world that is messy. A world where the food does not come automatically. A world where happiness is not guaranteed. A world where suffering happens. Because it is only in such a world that we will learn to be children of God. It is only in such a world that we will learn that we need to be in community with each other. It is only in such a world that we will learn that in the same way that God has come alongside us, bringing us comfort in every affliction, so we ourselves, as the children of God, can learn to come alongside one another, to comfort others as we ourselves have been comforted and come alongside of.

Only through the challenges and struggles and difficulties will we learn these things. If you can figure out how to swap places with Sweetums, if you can become a big fish in a small pond where the food shows up automatically, if you can arrange your life so that there are no challenges or struggles or difficulties, then you will never need to learn how to be one of the children of God. But it turns out that God is not following the Fat Catfish model of how to run the world. God is following the Children of God model, where the challenges and struggles and difficulties are real, and where we receive comfort in every affliction, so that we in turn can become agents of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Third Person of the Trinity who comes to comfort us. Only in a world like this will we learn to be children of God who live lives full of the compassion of God the Father and God the Son.

Pastor Harold was one of the members of the ministers’ support group I attended many years ago: a wise older pastor who had many helpful insights to share with a young pup pastor like me. He once shared with us a story from when he was a young pastor, back in the 1940s. He had just been ordained and had been called to his first church, and about two weeks later there was a baby that died of crib death. They didn’t have fancy names like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome back then. All they had was this terrible devastation, with no explanation at all. And Pastor Harold realized that he didn’t have a clue as to how to offer comfort in a situation like this.

But he had the wisdom to ask around, “Who in this community has faced this kind of situation, and lived through it?” And several people came up with the name of a woman. This woman was not a member of the church. But Harold went to visit her anyway, and said to her, “You’ve been through this. And you learned some things, in the process. So will you come with me, and share with this family that has lost this baby?”

The woman hesitated about this. But in the end she agreed. And she did it.

And she discovered, in the process of doing so, that she had words to share that she did not know she had. She discovered that some of her own healing became more established as she shared with this family in their time of suffering. She discovered that it is true, that the Holy Spirit enables us to do what we didn’t think we could do. And she discovered that the God of all comfort comforts us in every affliction, and that we can therefore comfort those in any affliction with the same comfort with which we have ourselves been comforted.

Because we are the children of God, and because God is following a Children-of-God model for how to run the universe, we find ourselves in a world where suffering happens. It is a world that is not designed for our convenience, but for our transformation. Because it is a world where suffering happens, it is also a world where comforting happens: the comforting presence of God, ministered to us by God the Spirit, God the Comforter who comes alongside us to comfort us in every affliction. And it is a world where we get the opportunity to learn not to be Fat Catfish, but to be children of God who do what God does, as we minister the comfort of God to others.