Hilton Head Island, SC – June 28, 2025
First Presbyterian Church
Hilton Head Island, SC
A Sermon by John M. Miller
This will not primarily be a series of memories of a daughter by her father, nor is it a short memorial service meditation. It is a full-length sermon about death. It was written because of the singular circumstances which prompted it, and which Pastor Will Robinson has graciously allowed me to deliver. Furthermore, it will be unlike any other sermon I have ever preached, and I do not expect everyone to agree with what I shall say.
I retired six months ago after being a parish preacher for a total of sixty years. In all that time, not surprisingly, I was never present twenty-four hours a day for five weeks with anyone who was dying. Amy had been battling three kinds of cancer for the past eleven years: first, breast cancer, then melanoma, then mesothelioma. Because she had been confronted by cancer for so long, I decided if we were ever going on an extended trip anywhere, it needed to happen soon. On February 10, we two began a transatlantic cruise from Miami to Barcelona, Spain. There was risk in such a venture, but there also was risk if we did not take that risk, as you can imagine. We would tour Barcelona and the Sagrada Familia, one of the most spectacular churches in the world. Then we would visit Amy’s brother and his family in Naples, Italy, where Andrew is stationed with the United States Navy. Then we would go to Istanbul, an architectural and historical city without peer. Amy discovered it was cheaper to fly northeast a thousand miles to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines and then back to New York than to fly from Naples to New York. To the end Amy was a daughter after her father’s thrifty heart.
After a week at sea, Amy became very ill, with flu-like symptoms. We went to the ship’s medical facility. Following a thorough examination, the doctor took me aside. He said she had a serious lung inflammation, having aspirated her own regurgitation the night before, and might not live through the night. I was thunderstruck. Then I felt very guilty, thinking it was a colossal mistake to take her on a cruise and then plan to travel hundreds of miles afterward. However, after being with her in the ship’s infirmary for several days and then for five weeks in Spanish hospital rooms, most of that time both day and night, I eventually realized that time together was a gift from God to both of us. But if Amy had not been such a determined fighter for her life, she would have died on the ship.
Because of those circumstances, we had much time to discuss many things. We recalled events in our distant and recent past. We laughed about humorous occasions in our lives together and separately. We explored how God seems to be both present and absent as life’s scroll is unfurled for everyone. Because Amy was my daughter, we verbalized our fantasies; we both were unfettered fantasizers. Throughout both of our lives we were “forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.” I was interested to learn that Amy was as much a dreamer as I was.
We discussed the status of the world, and how perilous it appears to be. We figured out how to fix it completely to our own satisfaction, and were quite pleased with ourselves. We expressed sadness that neither of us was ever in a position to have a major influence on anyone about anything, so we laid our splendid thoughts to rest, incapable of putting our extraordinary ideas into practice. We pondered the twists and turns our own lives had taken.
Four days after leaving the ship for a hospital in Cartagena, Spain, Amy suffered a stroke that paralyzed her left side, but at least she did not lose her ability to speak. The medical staff were God’s angels who kept her going throughout her ordeal.
Having spent most of my life thinking about the Christian religion and its wide-ranging theology, I have come to believe that the providence of God is, for me, the most important and influential of all Christian doctrines for determining the sequences of every human life. Most people seem to believe that in some mysterious yet discernible way, God determines everything that happens to us. Everything occurs through God’s providence, it is believed via this notion. Thus, it is thought, God determines who gets born to which parents and who marries whom and how many children anyone has and who lives through tornadoes, etc., etc., etc..
For at least forty or fifty years, I have not understood providence in the usual way. Not only does God not determine everything that happens, He probably directly determines nothing that happens.
God did not decide that it was time for Amy Miller Plasket Crisp to die on April 1, 2025. It was nature that determined that. God is not nature, and nature is not God. God created nature, but for reasons known only to Him, He chose never to control it. In its God-given freedom, nature --- by way of aspiration pneumonia and the stroke it may have caused, and by nature’s infinite impassivity --- nature concluded that Amy must leave the huge ship Allure of the Seas exactly on her sixtieth birthday --- and die five weeks later. God did not determine that; nature did.
God primarily uses human beings providentially to manifest His will. We are God’s providence in action. We are His hands and feet, His heart and help. The doctors and nurses on that ship and in those Spanish hospitals and in Cartersville, Georgia did everything in their power to keep Amy alive. It was remorseless, relentless illness or Covid or norovirus that caused her to die. No one, including God, could stop it.
You may wonder how I can be so clinically analytical about all this or ask why preaching this sermon will not move me to dissolve into tears. Frankly, it is because for at least seventy years I have been strangely fixated on death. I decided to become a minister in fifth grade. At sixteen I planned my own funeral. Both of those factors are profoundly odd. I have preached at minimally five hundred funerals, memorial services, or celebrations of life. I have met personally with hundreds of grieving family members. Here are a couple of statements I have quoted in those services: John Donne - “DEATH, be not proud,/ Though some have called thee mighty and dreadful,/ For thou art not so.” Emily Dickinson - “Because I could not stop for Death,/ He kindly stopped for me./ The carriage held but just ourselves/ And Immortality.” Mark Twain said the only two things you can count on in life are death and taxes. Depending on how low their income is, some people never pay income taxes. Nonetheless, we shall all die, and it behooves everyone to ponder deeply what that does and does not mean.
By now it may have occurred to some of you that this is beginning to sound like a post-retirement coming-out-of-the-closet sermon. After sixty long years as a minister, I can say whatever I truly want, and nothing untoward will happen as a result, either to you or me.
Amy was unique. Every single person is unique, but Amy was unique in a particularly Amian way. She was kind. She was placid. She always somehow managed to avoid arguments - - - very much like her mother. Amy would never speak ill of anyone, even if she thought it. She sailed through sixty years of life without ever concluding that this life is ultimately ominous. I think it was eternal life that captivated Amy more than temporality. She confessed to me, and I confessed to her, that it is impossible to imagine what, where, when or how eternal life is to be experienced. Conversing about such matters occurred to us only because we were together for five weeks as she was dying, although at the time neither of us dared to think that. Each of us suspected it might be happening, but we never talked directly about it. Intuitively, I think we both felt nothing would be gained by voicing such heavy musings.
I always knew Amy was intelligent, but I had never realized how much above average she was. Like many people her age, she didn’t subscribe to newspapers or news magazines, and yet she learned and retained myriad thoughts and facts about myriad subjects. Perhaps it was because she home-schooled her son for his entire school career or she read so much on the Internet (which may --- or may not --- be the best place to search for facts). Her final goal was to see her son graduate from high school. In any case, I learned she was a wealth of information and opinions, and I quickly acquired more admiration for both of those personal traits.
Amy passed the test given by God to everyone when they die. Because God is a God of “grace and glory,” everyone passes the test. I believe that all are instantaneously advanced to eternal life. There presumably whatever was incorrect about us in earthly life gets corrected in heavenly life. As the apostle Paul wrote in I Timothy (if Paul did write First and Second Timothy, and if he did say this), it is one of the most reassuring of biblical verses: “God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Tim.2:4). In light of most of the rest of what Paul said, it’s hard to imagine he also said that. Nevertheless, it’s there in black and white, and if that’s what God wants, that’s what God gets. Universal salvation is by no means a universally-affirmed doctrine, yet in an isolated and ultimately universally uplifting verse, perhaps in a weak moment, Paul (or somebody else) actually wrote that. I choose to assume he meant it.
Amy died, but she didn’t stay dead. All of us shall die, but none shall stay dead, let alone go to hell (which I think is a hell of a punitive idea). Just before Pope Francis died, he said, “Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something.”
It was certainly a blessing to me that I was with my daughter in those difficult days. I hope it was also a blessing for Amy. People who are gravely ill encounter truths most of us healthy ones cannot fully grasp. To be with someone in that situation is a priceless gift to both.
On April 1 at about 5:45 PM, Brandon called me to say that Amy had died. Both he and Kermit were there at the moment of her death, and I am very grateful for that. We didn’t talk for long; what, of more substance, was there to say? I quickly finished dinner, and sat alone in our living room. I was there for a couple of hours, thinking numerous thoughts and sorting through them. Then I realized I was very tired. I went to bed, and quickly fell asleep. I did not wake again until 5:45 AM. I was amazed I slept so long.
Eventually, within a few days, I concluded that Amy may have willed herself to die. Perhaps she figured she had had enough, and even if her goal to see her son graduate was not met, she felt that death was better than the life she had been living over the previous eleven years, and especially the last six weeks. I was glad that my long-stricken daughter died. Not just relieved, but glad. At last she was free.
As recent decades have passed, too many of us live beyond ourselves. The “selves” we were for most of our lives become unrecognizable to us or anyone else. Sixty has become a relatively young age at which to die, but living another eleven years like her last eleven years would have been a curse for Amy, and not a blessing.
A couple of weeks after Amy died, I wrote her Spanish neurologist, informing him of her death. He wrote back, saying, “Amy’s cancer is one of the toughest, and has a really bad prognosis. But Amy was a fighter and endured it in order to return home.” She was flown back to her earthly home only to fly four days later to her heavenly home. There are many things in life that are far worse than death. Nature, and Amy, ended her painful eleven years of remorseless illness.
How can I be so calm and seemingly unmoved by all this? Death is profoundly real, but I believe that it ends “in a moment, in the twinkling of eye,” which Paul almost certainly did write (I Cor. 15:52). The Christian religion is based upon the monumental concept of resurrection. If the end event in all four of the Gospels had not been proclaimed, there would have been no beginning to any Gospel. Amy died, but now she is with all the millions of people who have lived before us, and who now are in the very presence of Almighty God and Jesus of Nazareth, whoever and wherever they are, and no one can explain or define that with unchallenged accuracy.
“Deep river, my home is over Jordan,/ Deep river, Lord/ I want to cross over into campground.” “Swing low, sweet chariot,/ Coming for to carry me home.” “Death will come to me one day,/ Jesu, cast me not away/ Dying, let me still abide/ In Thy heart and wounded side.” The first three lines of that anthem are outstanding; the last one has dated imagery , but those first three lines are realistically powerful.
Here is the point of this very long memorial service sermon:
The strife is o’er, the battle done,
The victory of life is won;
The song of triumph has begun:
Alleluia!