This message was originally delivered at Richmond First Friends on August 11, 2019.
The year is 2001. Rais Bhuyian works 13 hour-days at a Texaco gas station in Dallas. He does that so he can save money to bring his wife from Bangladesh to the United States. On September 21, he wakes up to fill in the morning shift because his co-worker had quit earlier that week. At about 12:30, a middle-aged white man walks into the store with a shotgun in his hands. Rais - trying to avoid conflict - begins pulling money out of the register and says, “Please don’t shoot me.”
The man with the gun ignores Rais and asks, “Where are you from?”
When Rais says “Excuse me?” in response, the gun fires.
According to a news story shortly afterward, “At least 38 pellets hit Bhuiyan. One broke out a tooth. A few went through the bridge of his nose. Several pierced his cheek and forehead and his right ear. And one pellet went right through the center of his pitch-black pupil, stopping millimeters from his brain.”
The year is 2001. Rais Bhuyian works 13 hour-days at a Texaco gas station in Dallas. He does that so he can save money to bring his wife from Bangladesh to the United States. On September 21, he wakes up to fill in the morning shift because his co-worker had quit earlier that week. At about 12:30, a middle-aged white man walks into the store with a shotgun in his hands. Rais - trying to avoid conflict - begins pulling money out of the register and says, “Please don’t shoot me.”
The man with the gun ignores Rais and asks, “Where are you from?”
When Rais says “Excuse me?” in response, the gun fires.
According to a news story shortly afterward, “At least 38 pellets hit Bhuiyan. One broke out a tooth. A few went through the bridge of his nose. Several pierced his cheek and forehead and his right ear. And one pellet went right through the center of his pitch-black pupil, stopping millimeters from his brain.”
His assailant was a man by the name of Mark Stroman. Stroman was a meth addict covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. As the news story author put it, “His father raised him on hate, beating him anytime he refused a fight. His mother once told him she had been $50 short of aborting him.”
After 9/11, Stroman says he went hunting for “A-rabs.” On his shooting spree, he shot not only Rais, but also Waqar Hasan, a Pakistani immigrant, and Vasudev Patel, an Indian Buddhist. Patel was killed and Stroman tried for his murder.
Which brings us back to Rais. Rais struggled to get back on his feet after the shooting. He had little money and couldn’t work in his condition. He was living with his boss, but eventually went couch-surfing from friend to friend. His wife in Bangladesh left the marriage when she learned he couldn’t pay her way here. But things did eventually begin to turn around. A friend got Rais a job at Olive Garden, and then he started taking classes, got his degree, and eventually landed a well-paying IT job. In 2009, he took a pilgrimage to Mecca with his mother. While there, Rais felt his fear and his hate leave him. He decided to dedicate his life to forgiveness. Rais had testified against Mark Stroman, who was sentenced to die in 2011, but now began working for his clemency.
While Texas ultimately executed Stroman, the two men did have one phone conversation just before Stroman’s death in which Stroman expressed how much Rais’s work had meant to him. Rais has since gone on to found World Without Hate, a nonprofit which seeks to teach mercy and forgiveness.
So, his story continues. Why is this story important to us, not only in light of the recent shootings in Dayton and El Paso, but on its own terms? What relevance do this Muslim convenience store worker and his assailant have to us here?
Perhaps it would help to step back and consider the Biblical tradition with respect to community.
I think it’s very difficult to read Scripture and come away without a profound sense of the critical importance of community and relationship. From the accounts of the Hebrew people and their interactions with their neighbors to Jesus and the Disciples to the early Christian communities to whom Paul addressed his epistles, there is woven through the text a thread of community and relationship at the heart of what it means to be followers of God.
Think about the significance of Jesus’s ministry to the Samaritan woman at the well - reaching out across lines of culture and religious tradition. This is by no means an exception for Jesus. We see again and again efforts to draw in the outcast, the loner, those which proper society finds less than worthy, and to restore their dignity, respect, and relationship.
As much as we might admire the dedication of the mystic in a mountain cave or a saint atop a pole in the desert, this is really not the model we see lifted up in the Bible. Instead what we see is groups of people gathering together to discern the way forward and grow themselves individually and collectively in the context of community.
In fact, Scripture is clear that we are responsible to one another - to encourage, admonish, instruct, and care for - and this is critical - not just each other, but even those outside of our congregations.
For me, at least, this radically re-frames what ministry can mean for us. Quakers have long had a strong tradition of social concerns - sometimes with mixed results - prison reform, education, Native American support, Japanese and Jewish refugees in WWII, food relief following WWII, etc. In my mind I have always equated these with specific marginalized groups or defined ministries. But what if the problem or issue is more diffuse, harder to pin down or target?
What if it has to do with the hollowing out of congregations, and what if that hollowing out it itself one aspect of a decreasing feeling of and appreciation for connectedness in general – from bowling leagues to Moose lodges to sewing circles and town halls and PTAs?
This is the thesis of the book Alienated America. In it, the author provides a wealth of evidence for the decline in social engagement among Americans – including religious community – and connects this to a host of detrimental health and well-being outcomes.
Can we see any of this in play here, and if so how might we be called to respond?
Now, don’t get me wrong - I happen to think that there is far more that the church can provide than simply threads to help hold together the social fabric, but it is interesting to think about how viewing our work partly through this lens could shift what our ministry looks like.
It could, for instance, mean striving to create community space for local residents – whether or not directly connected to our membership or our explicit ministry.
And also perhaps looking intentionally for those who might not fit easily within our comfort zone. In the community of Jesus this was the tax collector, the centurion, the prostitute. In our own, who might these be? The soldier, the addict, the immigrant?
It could also mean shifting our understanding of ministry to recognizing gaps in the social fabric of the community and finding ways to bind it back together. It could also mean looking around at those in our community and seeing not an infinite set of needs but instead an abundance of gifts waiting to be invited into use for the benefit of the world. To restore to others their sense of worth and dignity and connection.
How do we help create the space for ministry – in all its varied forms – to flourish?
And this brings me back once again to Rais.
Even isolated from his home country he had a family, a faith community, and a support system that helped him find healing and the capacity to heal others even out of an experience of terrible personal loss.
The man who shot him had no such support system – and he had the capacity to inflict immense pain and suffering on others.
Jesus modeled a ministry of restoration and wholeness to those alienated from the surrounding society.
How can we best join him in that vital work?
After 9/11, Stroman says he went hunting for “A-rabs.” On his shooting spree, he shot not only Rais, but also Waqar Hasan, a Pakistani immigrant, and Vasudev Patel, an Indian Buddhist. Patel was killed and Stroman tried for his murder.
Which brings us back to Rais. Rais struggled to get back on his feet after the shooting. He had little money and couldn’t work in his condition. He was living with his boss, but eventually went couch-surfing from friend to friend. His wife in Bangladesh left the marriage when she learned he couldn’t pay her way here. But things did eventually begin to turn around. A friend got Rais a job at Olive Garden, and then he started taking classes, got his degree, and eventually landed a well-paying IT job. In 2009, he took a pilgrimage to Mecca with his mother. While there, Rais felt his fear and his hate leave him. He decided to dedicate his life to forgiveness. Rais had testified against Mark Stroman, who was sentenced to die in 2011, but now began working for his clemency.
While Texas ultimately executed Stroman, the two men did have one phone conversation just before Stroman’s death in which Stroman expressed how much Rais’s work had meant to him. Rais has since gone on to found World Without Hate, a nonprofit which seeks to teach mercy and forgiveness.
So, his story continues. Why is this story important to us, not only in light of the recent shootings in Dayton and El Paso, but on its own terms? What relevance do this Muslim convenience store worker and his assailant have to us here?
Perhaps it would help to step back and consider the Biblical tradition with respect to community.
I think it’s very difficult to read Scripture and come away without a profound sense of the critical importance of community and relationship. From the accounts of the Hebrew people and their interactions with their neighbors to Jesus and the Disciples to the early Christian communities to whom Paul addressed his epistles, there is woven through the text a thread of community and relationship at the heart of what it means to be followers of God.
Think about the significance of Jesus’s ministry to the Samaritan woman at the well - reaching out across lines of culture and religious tradition. This is by no means an exception for Jesus. We see again and again efforts to draw in the outcast, the loner, those which proper society finds less than worthy, and to restore their dignity, respect, and relationship.
As much as we might admire the dedication of the mystic in a mountain cave or a saint atop a pole in the desert, this is really not the model we see lifted up in the Bible. Instead what we see is groups of people gathering together to discern the way forward and grow themselves individually and collectively in the context of community.
In fact, Scripture is clear that we are responsible to one another - to encourage, admonish, instruct, and care for - and this is critical - not just each other, but even those outside of our congregations.
For me, at least, this radically re-frames what ministry can mean for us. Quakers have long had a strong tradition of social concerns - sometimes with mixed results - prison reform, education, Native American support, Japanese and Jewish refugees in WWII, food relief following WWII, etc. In my mind I have always equated these with specific marginalized groups or defined ministries. But what if the problem or issue is more diffuse, harder to pin down or target?
What if it has to do with the hollowing out of congregations, and what if that hollowing out it itself one aspect of a decreasing feeling of and appreciation for connectedness in general – from bowling leagues to Moose lodges to sewing circles and town halls and PTAs?
This is the thesis of the book Alienated America. In it, the author provides a wealth of evidence for the decline in social engagement among Americans – including religious community – and connects this to a host of detrimental health and well-being outcomes.
Can we see any of this in play here, and if so how might we be called to respond?
Now, don’t get me wrong - I happen to think that there is far more that the church can provide than simply threads to help hold together the social fabric, but it is interesting to think about how viewing our work partly through this lens could shift what our ministry looks like.
It could, for instance, mean striving to create community space for local residents – whether or not directly connected to our membership or our explicit ministry.
And also perhaps looking intentionally for those who might not fit easily within our comfort zone. In the community of Jesus this was the tax collector, the centurion, the prostitute. In our own, who might these be? The soldier, the addict, the immigrant?
It could also mean shifting our understanding of ministry to recognizing gaps in the social fabric of the community and finding ways to bind it back together. It could also mean looking around at those in our community and seeing not an infinite set of needs but instead an abundance of gifts waiting to be invited into use for the benefit of the world. To restore to others their sense of worth and dignity and connection.
How do we help create the space for ministry – in all its varied forms – to flourish?
And this brings me back once again to Rais.
Even isolated from his home country he had a family, a faith community, and a support system that helped him find healing and the capacity to heal others even out of an experience of terrible personal loss.
The man who shot him had no such support system – and he had the capacity to inflict immense pain and suffering on others.
Jesus modeled a ministry of restoration and wholeness to those alienated from the surrounding society.
How can we best join him in that vital work?