My grandmother's faith and the bread of life

The following is the sermon I gave Aug. 19, 2012, at Central Lutheran. It's the story of my grandmother's life and faith, combined with the text for that day, John 6:51-58, where Jesus says that he is the true bread from heaven. Those who abide in him, eat and drink of him, will have eternal life.

Grandma and I in 2006, with a prayer shawl from Central Lutheran

Before my sabbatical earlier this year, I knew very little about the life and faith story of my paternal grandmother, Janina Smith. I knew she was a survivor of a Soviet work camp during World War II and that she was separated from most of her family at a very young age. I knew she was a kind and loving grandmother who baked cookies, showed up at our concerts and sporting events and encouraged us to follow the path in life that would make us truly happy. I never asked her about her life or faith because my parents told me not to bother her. She died five years ago. On sabbatical, I finally viewed a video of my grandmother talking about her life and her faith. I also did an extensive interview with my aunt Barb, her daughter. Here's what I learned.

She was born in Jasna, Poland, which is now in the Ukraine, in 1926, the youngest of six children, five girls and one boy. In September of 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the West and the Soviet army invaded from the East. During the years of 1939-1941, as many as 1 million Polish people were either killed or deported to work camps in Siberia. In 1940, my grandmother and her family were taken. She was 14 years old.

Her family lived on a small farm. On the night the soldiers came, only her father, three sisters and one brother were home. Her mother was staying with her older sister, husband and family and helping look after the little ones. It was winter. Her father work them up one morning saying, “Children, wake up, there are soldiers coming.” A dog was barking. They watched the soldiers coming closer. They knocked and came in without waiting for an invitation. They searched her father and brother for guns, found nothing and ordered them to start packing. A soldier stood over them with a gun. They packed – bedding, clothes, food. The rest was left behind. My grandma remembers crying and being so confused what was happening. Then the bobsleds started coming and took them to the train depot, where they were loaded into boxcars, four families to a car.

It was a plain wooden boxcar, with some wooden bunks for sleeping. The train was headed for the next town, Lwow, where my grandma's older sister lived. One of their neighbors had escaped, Grandma doesn't know how, and was able to go to her sister's house, tell them what happened and tell them to meet up at the train station.

When they stopped at Lwow, my grandma's mother, older sister and her family met them there. They saw them through cracks in the windows. They screamed for each other. Soldiers opened the door. The ones outside of the train begged to join their family. The soldiers said no, and slammed the door. My grandmother said, “It was a terrible thing. There was not a thing we could do. It was a terrible day.” She never saw her mother again.

When the train crossed the Polish/Soviet border, everyone cried. People were praying and singing Polish religious songs. But the train kept going. They were cold. There was no privacy, though some Polish ladies had set up a curtained area in one of the boxcars for a bathroom. They were served a thin soup that smelled like fish and shared what little food they had brought along. Babies would cry. Some people died on the train. The soldiers would open the boxcar and haul out the bodies. They asked if there would be a funeral and the soldiers said, no, they would just put them all in one big hole. “It was very scary,” my grandma said. They were on that train for over a month. Then they arrived in Siberia.

They were assigned a small house, and several families shared it. My grandma said the only thing they could see was timber, timber and sky. Everyone went to work, except my grandmother, who was deemed too young, and another sister, Agnescia, who was sick with a kidney infection. Even so, it fell to Agnescia and my grandmother to do the cooking. They got one piece of bread about six inches long that was supposed to last for the whole week. They got a little bit of rice, barley and a few potatoes. Agnescia made a thin soup. It wasn't enough.

Grandma said: “It was pretty rough. We didn't know how long it was going to be or how many of us were going to survive. But we all Polish people stuck together and tried to help one another. And prayed that someday will come some kind of relief. Somebody will ask for us.”

After work, they went to meetings. Attendance was mandatory and the agenda was propaganda. The Soviets told them how lucky they were and how good they had it at the camp. They told them there was no God, that Stalin was a god. They told them that whenever they saw hair grow on their palms, that's the day they would see Poland again. Grandma said they just looked at each other and hoped it wasn't true.

Grandma got by one year without working, but the next year she was deemed old enough. She worked from sunup to sundown, picking up brush and burning it and collecting sap from trees. They got a lot of cheap labor out of us, she said. Her family was there for more than two years. At some point along the way, her sister Agnescia died. She doesn't go into detail about it.

Finally, relief came. Grandma credits Winston Churchill and FDR for their liberation. They were sent somewhere in Asia first, Grandma doesn't say where, then the family was sent to Iran, where the Red Cross provided for them. Unfortunately, Grandma wasn't strong enough to go on to Iran right away; she was held back because she was too sick. She could barely move her legs; she was skin and bones. She was starving to death. When she was finally nursed back to health, she was sent to Iran, but her family was gone. The Red Cross sent people wherever there was room – Argentina, Brazil and Africa. Her sisters Marie and Honia and their father were sent to Kenya. Her brother volunteered for the British Army and later died in the D-Day invasion. One of my cousins found his grave in Loreto, Italy. My grandma's father didn't want to stay in Africa and eventually set out for Poland, where his wife and oldest daughter still lived. He got as far as London, where he died of pneumonia. No one in my family knows where he is buried.

Meanwhile, my grandmother was alone in Iran, though there were other Polish refugees there. She signed up to work as a waitress in a US Army mess hall for officers. There she met a young technical sergeant from Iowa there who was in charge of the warehouse of food and supplies. They fell in love and had to cross the border into Iraq to get married because that was the nearest US embassy. The date was June 15, 1946. When they both finally got back to Iowa (traveling separately), they started their new life together in rural Northeast Iowa. They farmed 240 acres and had four children. I am the eldest daughter of their eldest son, and I was raised on that same 240 acres and in the same house. My grandmother would return to Poland four times as an adult, but she didn't make it while her mother was still alive. Those were the days of the Cold War and travel to Poland was forbidden. My grandma wrote letters to her mother and her eldest sister in Poland, sending money and gifts. They later found out the money never made it. My grandmother did reunite with the three sisters who survived the war, but they all preceded her in death. She also remained close with her nieces and nephews, who live in Toronto, Chicago and Australia. Someday, I hope to visit them where they live.

My grandparents were very much in love. When my grandmother was dying of pancreatic cancer in 2007, she took my grandfather by the shoulders and said, “make sure you eat good and don't go down those basement steps.” She died in 2007; my grandfather followed in 2008, still carrying a picture of her in his wallet and telling everyone that she was the most beautiful girl and the most wonderful wife.

These past few weeks we've been focusing on the bread of life text from John 6. We've heard about Jesus feeding the 5,000 and about the throngs of people who follow him, looking for bread but missing the sign that Jesus himself is God incarnate and that Jesus will feed them with his own self. This week, Jesus makes the shocking statement that moves us from bread and fish to flesh and blood. He's not just a magician who multiplies, but he is the one who feeds us by getting into us in a real and tangible way.

John 6:56 may be the heart of the whole thing: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” John uses the word “abide” 40 times in his gospel, though sometimes it's translated “remain” or “stay.” The body and blood of Jesus reminds us in a tangible way that Jesus abides in us. Maybe the harder thing to realize is that we also abide in God. Abiding goes both ways and it lasts forever. You belong to God and you abide in God. That is the good news.

You can never really know another person's faith. You can only hear their stories and see the fruit that is their life's work. I never asked my grandma about her faith; I sure wish I had. But my aunt Barb did and she said that my grandmother was never bitter. Raised, Catholic, Grandma kept the picture of the Virgin Mary up in her bedroom and a rosary on her dresser, even though she and Grandpa attended the Methodist church near their home. Though they attended for years, it wasn't until my grandmother was sick that my grandfather finally decided to get baptized. He was 87 years old. Grandma said that her faith helped her survive the ordeal in Siberia. The one thing the Soviets couldn't take from them was their faith. My grandmother forgave the soldiers and chose not to be angry with God. She said that God didn't take them to Siberia. I would add: God was abiding with her from Siberia to Iran to Iowa.

Someone once said that Christianity is the most incarnational religion. We have a God who came down to earth and was incarnate, born, of woman. He lived, breathed, ate, laughed, cried, suffered and died. Now we eat of this bread and drink of this cup, as a way of getting Jesus inside of us. Then we go out, and serve as as Jesus' hands and feet in this world. As my Grandma learned, when God is in you this deeply and you are in God, there is no one and no thing that can pull you away from the safe place where you truly abide. Amen.