FUNERAL HOMILY for John Milton McCoy, Jr.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Romans 8:31-39; John 14:1-6, 25-27

Theodore J. Wardlaw

September 3, 2015

Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church

Dallas 

I am honored today to have been invited by this congregation’s Pastor, the Reverend Matthew Ruffner, to share in this service and to offer these words today in witness to the Resurrection, and in memory of my dear friend, and yours, the Reverend Dr. John Milton McCoy, Jr.  As far as I’m concerned, this moment has come far too soon; and don’t we all feel that way? And yet, from another angle of vision, the shock of his being so quickly taken from us pales in comparison to the wonder that he was ever given to us at all. And so, with broken hearts, let us yet thank God. 

The Lord be with you (and also with you). Let us pray:

Eternal God, your love for us is everlasting; you alone can turn the shadow of death into the brightness of the morning light. Help us, in the stillness of this hour, to turn to you with believing hearts. And in our grief, come and speak to us of eternal things, so that, having heard your promises in scripture, we may have hope and be lifted above our distress into the peace of your presence; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

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“In life and in death, we belong to God.” These are the first words of the most recent theological statement of faith to be found in our official Presbyterian theological standards—The Book of Confessions—and these words were written in the wake of the reunion in 1983 of the two largest Presbyterian communions in the United States. The entire statement of faith—known, not surprisingly, as “A Brief Statement of Faith”—is short enough to be used liturgically as the Affirmation of Faith in worship, and it often is. It would take a long time for us to read out loud some of the other confessions of faith in our Book of Confessions—say, the Westminster Confession, for example—but this one is short and clear. There’s a paragraph that focuses on trust in Jesus Christ, and his death and resurrection; then there’s a paragraph that focuses on trust in God—the One Who created us and the world and called it all good; and then there’s a paragraph that focuses on trust in the Holy Spirit—the Spirit that gives us the courage, to be, in essence, the Church—the arms and legs of God’s ongoing work in the world.

But what I like the most about this particular statement of faith is that opening declaration. I like it for its bold proclamation about who and whose we are.  It just establishes a base-line that runs beneath all of human life, that takes the ups and downs of it—the joys and the sorrows of it, the things of beauty that leave us speechless, and the tragedies that break our hearts—and just boils it all down to one simple sentence:  “In life and in death, we belong to God.” Say it with me, would you?  “In life and in death, we belong to God.”

And these words are a kind of echo, really, of an earlier entry in our Book of Confessions—the Heidelberg Catechism from the sixteenth century. That catechism was the product of a collaboration in that day between German followers of Martin Luther and Swiss followers of John Calvin, and it was written in a question and answer format. And the very first question in this catechism, the first in a series of 129 questions, is this: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” and the answer comes: “That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ… 

And, in turn, this portion of the Heidelburg Catechism is itself an echo going all the way back to the last verse of our Epistle lesson for today, where St. Paul, in a kind of literary flourish, declares to those Christians in Rome: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Now I could go on with a longer discourse on this—I’ve gone on as long as I have because John would be ashamed of me if I passed up a chance to teach some Reformed theology to a crowd as large as this one—but we are here today to remember, in general, that “in life and in death we belong to God”; and to be comforted, in particular, that in life and in death John belongs to God.

Lord knows that John belonged to God in life. John loved life, loved his life, saw it all as a gift. He and his precious Sue were like coffee and cream (and that’s what he would call her if he were with us right now, “my precious Sue”). They nurtured and shaped that amazing family they brought into the world—Bill and Laura and Paige—and their spouses—Stacy and Billy and Shay—and all of the grandchildren—Jessica and Mindy and William and West and Colton and Luke and Victoria. John had, of course, a presence and a dignity about him that was just naturally senatorial—so much so that maybe an outsider’s first impression of him might be that he was a bit “starchy” and standoffish—but all of that went away when you noticed that ever-present twinkle in the eye, and certainly the family knew that well.

John and Sue were such a team, from their very beginning together. Their first home together was an apartment on the campus of the seminary that I serve in Austin.  John had graduated from the University of Texas, and he was beginning his seminary career at Austin Seminary, from which he would graduate and go on to Princeton Theological Seminary for his Ph.D. in Theology. Warner Bailey, another retired minister in this presbytery and a contemporary of John’s at Austin Seminary, wrote me yesterday. “John,” he said, was envied by us single guys in Currie Hall. He was recently married to gorgeous Sue, …and I was a guest in their apartment frequently, [as] Sue’s cooking was a welcome relief from the fried baloney and cheese served in the refectory.”  Warner recounts such lovely memories of his own Ph.D. work at Yale following seminary, while John was at Princeton, and their theological friendship was nourished during those years. And when Warner went to Ridgelea Church in Fort Worth, it was John who preached at his installation.

John and Sue were a team across all of those years of parish ministry—serving first at St. Paul’s Church in Groves, Texas; and then at Highland Park Church where John was an Assistant Pastor; and later at First Church in Morganton, North Carolina; and then St. Andrew’s Church in Denton; and then NorthPark Church in Dallas; and then in his retirement back to Highland Park as a Theologian-in-Residence; and more recently to this church.

Their joy together was palpable. John loved everything! He loved music. He once quoted Friderich Nietzsche, who said that “without music life would be a mistake.” Music, said John, and these are his words, “is that precious reality, that admixture of sorrow, joy, wonder, and anguish of the human spirit that is an echo of the yearning within us all toward that shining, transcendent light that we call God.” Can’t you just hear him saying that?  And he loved the theatre.  Whether he was playing Tevya in “Fiddler on the Roof,” or Doolittle in “My Fair Lady,” or King Arthur in “Camelot,” or Captain Von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” (there’s type-casting for you!), he was at home on the stage.  He was quoted in a story in today’s Dallas Morning News as describing a good preacher as “a ham with integrity.” John was the picture of integrity. 

He acted, he sang, he wrote music. Once in a while, when I might be in the car with him and Sue, he’d plug in a c.d. and say, “I want you to hear a great piece of music,” and it would be him singing something. The mischief, the twinkle in the eye. We’re going to miss that self-deprecating, utterly joyful sense of humor.

And we’re going to miss the Irish stories. He told them everywhere, including at Austin Seminary Board meetings. If there was a controversy, about anything, there was an Irish story ready at hand to cut the tension. I loved them, especially the ones that involved another passion of his—golf. He had a series of Irish stories about a golfer and his caddy. After playing several holes, the golfer said to his caddy, “Can I make it to the green with a seven-iron?” and the caddy said, “Eventually.”  The golfer said, “Why do you keep looking at your watch?” and the caddy said, “It’s not a watch, it’s a compass; we left the fairway an hour ago.” The golfer said, “You are the worst caddy I’ve ever had!” and the caddy said, “Now there’s a coincidence.”    

We loved all of that. On the day of his last Seminary Board meeting several years ago, before he rotated off, he said some appreciative things, since he was the outgoing Chair of the Board, and then handed the gavel to his successor, the new Board chair Cassandra Carr. She stood up nervously and said, “First of all, I want you to know that I don’t know any Irish stories,” and the Board gave her a standing ovation.

We loved John, and John loved life. He loved everything, and he lived it joyfully.

John loved the life of the mind in obedience to God. He was a Renaissance man, of course. He would sit up there in that elegant study in their home, with a view of the fireplace off to his left and surrounded by bookcases filled with books.  Biblical commentaries, theological writings—everything from John Calvin to Karl Barth to Teilhard de Chardin, the works of Shakespeare (one of his favorite figures in literature), books on science and theology (because John was interested in everything; and certainly the notion of a cosmic Christ, alive in the whole universe, was a special interest of his). My friend and colleague, Professor Bill Greenway at the Seminary, Professor of Philosophical Theology, wrote me a condolence the other day, and here is how he described John: “A Christian intellectual committed to the church and never closed to thinking through the faith fearlessly with rigor and passion…John will always be remembered,” he said, “in connection with what he was so very passionate about: thinking through the faith for the sake of ministry and the furthering of the gospel…”

I love the way Bill Greenway put that.

And all of that disciplined energy, all of that stewardship of the mind, was dedicated—most particularly, I think, in these more recent years—to his preaching and teaching ministry. There are people in this room who know and love our big God because John McCoy, with his evangelical heart and his brilliant mind, introduced them to that big God.

He understood—in fact, he “stood under”—the command from our Old Testament text, from the book of Deuteronomy, to give everything you have to God. I listen to those words—“you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”—and I think that that’s how John lived. Keeping the words of that commandment in his heart, and teaching them to his children—not just his own children, but to so many others, whether young in years or young in the faith. It’s possible in the course of a life to live in such a way that one’s heart and soul and might are devoted to God. It’s possible to live one’s life in such a way that those who populate the pathways of one’s life are molded by the truth of that story that so thoroughly inhabits you. It’s possible to live in such a way as to bear witness that God alone is Lord, and that all other would-be gods are nothing but pretenders. It’s possible to live like that because we have seen Jesus live like that. It’s possible to live like that because the Church has witnessed the saints across twenty centuries living like that. And in these days, it’s possible to live like that because we watched John McCoy live like that. And so, of course, we affirm that, in life, John belonged to God. 

And now our faith gives us the words and the courage to say that, in death, too, John belongs to God. He is safe now in the everlasting arms of God. He has entered a joy that God himself has prepared for him. Darkness has fallen away, and there is light and peace all around him, and for John it is a grand new adventure. Nothing separates John now from the love of the risen Christ—not death, not life, not angels, not principalities, not powers, not things present, not things to come, not height, not depth, not any other creature.  

And as Jesus reminds us in our Gospel text for today, from the Gospel of John, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, you may be also.” That’s the promise of our faith—that John is with God—and we are here to claim and celebrate that promise.

During the dark days of World War 2, when the city of London was being bombed to smithereens, King George V, in his Christmas radio address to all of his subjects in Great Britain, quoted from a poem words which were made for that occasion, and I think for this occasion. He said, “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”

Thanks be to God that our beloved John, who stood on this past Sunday morning at the gate of new life, has put his hand into the hand of God, and has stepped into eternity where there is no more time or sorrow or sighing. Neither are there tears or pain anymore. It is far better than light, and far safer than a known way; for he is now embraced by the God who loves him so—who always has—and he is, most profoundly, home. 

For after all, in life and in death, we belong to God. 

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