Overcoming Fear with Faith | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

1:22 holds one of the most important keys to overcoming our fear and that's part of why we're focused on this so today we're going to be talking about the fears that we have related to what's happening in our world and the pretty big fears we're going to talk about in just a moment but before that I want to say this week I had three different well three different encounters with people who talked about their fears about what's going on in our society. I had a couple who came in, and they're probably mid-80s, and they were coming to talk about end-of-life issues. They had some questions, and we were talking about end-of-life things. But in the middle of that conversation, the wife broke out and said, you know, I just feel so anxious right now with what's happening in the world around us, and I'm worried about how polarized we are and how, you know, the conflict we see all around us. And then the husband said, yeah, I watch what we're doing, and I see, you know, things that are happening in the news, and I think, I'm worried about World War III for my grandchildren. Now, they hadn't come in to talk about that. They just come in to talk about near, you know, the end of life issues. But this is what was on their hearts. I received an email that day from one of our members at another of our locations, our Brookside location. And he said, you know, I'm just feeling frustrated and upset and angry and disappointed and, you know, just confused and fearful about what's happening, you know, in our society. He was talking about Minneapolis in particular. Then I had a woman come in later on that afternoon. It just struck me, all three of these in this one day, a woman came in later on that day, and she came in to talk about marriage issues. But in the process of talking about that, she began to articulate her fears, what she was feeling as she was watching the news, and just the society that we're living in today, what it feels, you know, feels fear-filled to these folks. And I'm pretty sure they're not the only ones who are feeling that way. So you may not be filled with fear. You may be, you know, pretty calm, but there are a lot of folks who are feeling a little bit anxious, a little worried about what's happening in our world. I mentioned last week that Chapman University conducts a study every year, a survey every year on fear. They've done it, I think 2025 was their 11th year. So they've done it during Obama's, the last year of Obama's presidency, Trump's first presidency, Biden's, and now Trump again. And the results were just released in October. And the leader of that study said this, Christopher Bader, he says, looking over the results of all of these years of doing this, he says, fear is taking a larger and larger role in American life. Americans are

3:31 afraid of more things than they used to be, and they're more afraid of those things than they used to be. Here at Resurrection, we took a survey in December. 3,387 of you filled out the survey. Now, 1,015 filled out the Chapman University survey. 3,387 took our survey. And what I love about it, Chapman's survey is of people all across America. The survey you took is of you. It's people who go to this church. Now, 11% are not churchgoers. They came on Christmas Eve Candlelight, and we announced it and they took the survey, but they said, I don't regularly go to church. 89% of them who took the survey go to church and they probably go here. So these are pretty good results, pretty good statistics to know what's going on and the pulse of our congregation. It was men and women. It was every generation. We had a really good spread of ages. And though we didn't ask about your political affiliation, we know the last time we did about six years ago, 40% of you were Republicans, 40% were Democrats, roughly, and 20% were independents. So pretty sure the people who took the survey represented all of those as well. So one of the questions, we talked about fear in two different questions. One was, what are the personal fears that you feel? You know, the things that you really worry about for yourself. And they were things like fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of my loved ones getting sick, fear of my getting sick, fear of death, and things like that.

4:45 We're going to talk about that next week and the week after this. But the first of the questions was simply, we laid out nine different things that you could respond to and then you could write in your own. And we just said, which of the broader societal fears are most on your heart right now? the things that lead you to feel fearful or anxious or concerned. I want to show you the results of these. So this is your data, and this is, again, which of the following broad fears cause you to feel anxious, concerned, or fearful? You could select four. The top one was decline of civility and the decline of empathy, and those were sort of linked together, 71%. Then the direction of government policies, 65%. Political divisions and unrest, 65%. So seven in 10 of you said the decline of civility is what worries you or leads you to feel fearful, and how that's reflected in terms of a lack of empathy. Direction of government policies, two out of three. Political divisions and unrest, roughly equal. It's like 15 votes less down here. And then I want you to notice how much more that is than these that follow. So number four was crime and violence, 37%. Economic recession, 30% were fearful or anxious or concerned about that. Climate change, 27%. Artificial intelligence, 25%. And then there were some that were below that, a number that were below that. So again, it just struck me that these were sometimes two times, nearly two times, and in some cases almost three times, the number of people who responded with these other concerns.

6:05 So we're going to talk about those top three concerns today, and they're all intertwined, and then we'll also talk about the fourth one, crime and violence, just briefly. So as we look at these, the feelings that we have of, you know, the concerns about civility, how we're getting along in our society have a lot to do with politics. And of course, The second response was our fear or concern about government policies and the direction of our country. And then again, finally, political divisions and unrest. So much of this is tied to who's in the White House. So the first time we did a survey like this, it was President Trump's first, actually his first year in office, and now once more in his first year of his second term. But if you take it during Biden, when Biden was president or Obama was president, you're going to find some of the same results. a sense of divisiveness, a sense of concern that, you know, we see things differently in very different ways and what's happening in our country. This was interesting. So in November, the Gallup poll wanted to see how people are feeling about the president and their ratings, their approval ratings, their disapproval. This is again in November. It was by the Gallup poll.

7:07 And 84% of Republicans said the president's, we approve of the job the president's doing as president, 25% of independents, and only 3% of Democrats approved of the president's, and you look at this, and you see what a quantum gap between Republicans and Democrats on how they evaluated the president. Let me just ask you, if the same poll, the same poll was actually conducted during when Biden was president, do you think it had the same results for 84% of Republicans in favor of Biden's? No, just the opposite, right? So you would have found Democrats, maybe not quite as high as 84%, but you would have found Democrats saying, hey, we think he's doing a great job, and Republicans would have said he's doing a terrible job, right? Our feelings about how things are going on in the society around us are often tied to the party that's in control and in particular who the president is. So we know that coming up this week, this Tuesday, is the one-year anniversary of the president's inauguration for his second term in office.

8:01 And so I was reading this week how are Americans feeling about that. The New York Times had an interesting article in which they had interviewed 11 Trump supporters. And I appreciate that because New York Times tends to lean left, but they were actually wanting their readers to understand, people who supported President Trump, what were they feeling? And so these were black, white, Latino. They were young and old, men and women. And here was the, so when you kind of narrow it down to what was the final summary, they were asked to, in a word, say how they felt about the first year the president was in office. And these were the words they used, amazing, describing President Trump's first term in office. Amazing, hopeful, great, excellent, and awesome. And if asked to give a grade on a grade card, it was A+. So the president had an A-plus year, according to these folks.

8:50 Now, Fox News, which leans more to the right, had a report this same week from the AP news poll that was taken. It was AP and the, what is it called, the National Opinion Research Center. They took a poll of Americans to see, do you approve of the job the president's doing? and they published it on their page this week. And it was taken January 8th through the 11th, so just this last week, to find out how Americans were feeling. And in this case, they were showing more negative results. So I'll just show you the poll results on this one. And today, 59% of Americans disapprove of the job the president's doing, 40% approve, which wasn't too dramatically different from when he began at 42% and 55% disapproving, 42% approving. But it tells us that, you know, while some are very excited about the president, there's a whole lot of people who are saying, I'm a little nervous about what's going on here. Interestingly enough, I looked to see, I went to their website to see, AP's website, to see, could you see what Kansas looks like and Missouri looks like?

9:47 When Kansas is about 50-50, and in Missouri it was 49-51, 49% disapprove, 51%, I'm sorry, 49% approve, 51% disapprove. So we're a little more even than the rest of the nation. Then on the AP website, they'd ask this question. So having described how some saw the president as great, the first year, amazing, hopeful, great, excellent, awesome, AP had asked this question. So far in his second term, do you think Donald Trump has been a great, good, average, poor, or terrible president? So 52% said he has been a poor and terrible president. I say that to say, which is it? Is he amazing and awesome or poor and terrible? Now I wanna pause here for a moment. and I want you to look around to see who's sitting near you. Just take a look and see. Look at the faces around you. All right, up here on the balcony too.

10:40 Can I tell you that there are people sitting around you who think he'd had an awesome and amazing year, and there are people sitting around you who think he had a terrible and poor year this last year, and they're all sitting around you. And when you go home today, if you're married, it's possible you actually have people who live with you who feel this, you know, who are in opposite directions. We as families feel differently about this. And so, you know, part of what that leads me to say is that we've gotta do a better job of understanding people in different places. I appreciated the New York Times running that story so that people who didn't understand and they sort of live in their own thought life could hear why certain people were feeling things a bit different. I wanna say this is one of the things I love about our congregation, by the way, is I love the fact that you are a congregation who's divided politically and you come together and you're united around your common faith in Jesus Christ. And as you're united in your common faith in Jesus Christ, you come to know people who see things differently than you, and you actually come to care about them.

11:38 You come to love them and respect them. And that's very different than what happens in churches in large portions of our country, where you'll find 70 or 80% of the people all are in the same place in terms of politics, some much more conservative, some more progressive. But what happens is when you only spend time with people who see things the way you see things, you begin to make assumptions about those people. You begin to assume the worst thing, you know, worst about those people. You begin to dislike those people or have disdain for those people. Now, it's interesting, there was another poll that was conducted. This is in 2022. Actually, the Pew Research Center did this in 2016, 2019, and 2022. And they asked Republicans, what do you think about Democrats? And Democrats, what do you think about Republicans? So in 2022, Republicans, so the numbers in red are Republican. Republicans said, 69% of Republicans said Democrats are closed-minded. 83% of Democrats said Republicans are closed-minded. 72% of Republicans said Democrats are dishonest.

12:34 64% said Republicans are dishonest. 72% of Republicans said Democrats are immoral. 63% of Democrats said Republicans are immoral. Roughly equal numbers said the other party was unintelligent. 62% of Republicans said Democrats were lazy. Now, only 26% of Democrats said that about Republicans. Here's the other thing I want you to notice is just how much this has changed. So let me take off all this. I just want you to notice in six years, from 2016 to 2022, look what happened. The increase in the number of people who thought poorly of people of the other party. Our views have become jaded about people who are different from ourselves. And again, part of the value, it used to be that churches would be places that brought people together, but today they're part of the problem instead of the solution. Again, I think you play a really important role, Church of the Resurrection, in Kansas City, in our denomination, because you have somehow managed to come together, to sit together, to worship together, to grow together, to love one another despite our differences.

13:36 And what you realize when you're in Sunday school or Bible study with people who see things differently is you look at those people who see it differently and you can't say that person's immoral. No, that's my brother in Christ. That person is lazy. No, that's my sister in Christ. She's not lazy. They're not dishonest. They just see things differently. All right, so when I think about that and our role here at Resurrection, I think when we leave church every Sunday and you're in the middle of conversations with people who are talking politics, it's great we talk politics, but when somebody begins to be dismissive of people who are in a different place in a society that's so hyper-polarized, you have a chance to say, you know what, my friend at Sunday school, they see things differently than me, but they're not immoral. They're not dishonest. They're not lazy. And I love them, right? And that's part of what it takes to be able to move away from the society that we find ourselves in.

14:31 Now, 10 years ago, when I preached this series of sermons, I gave an acronym for fear that was aimed at helping us overcome fear. So the sermon series was called Unafraid. And I wrote a book a couple of years after that called Unafraid. And in it, there's this acronym. Now, last week, I shared the acronym for fear, false events appearing real, that we have a tendency to catastrophize. We see things that are, you know, and we become really afraid when we don't need to be afraid. But this acronym for fear is how you overcome it. So here they are. There were four letters, fear. F is face your fears with faith. Actually, let me just pause there for a moment. Face your fears with faith. So we can face our, you know, we can not face our fears and we can just experience them and feel them and not really articulate or think about why am I feeling this way. Or we can face them. And then as we face them, we begin to say, but wait a minute, I gotta remember that I'm not alone in whatever's going on in the world and that there is a God in the universe that I believe in who walks with me all the time, whose Holy Spirit dwells inside of me.

15:27 And because of that, I don't have to be afraid. I mean, things might be terrifying, but I'm still going to be walking with God who ultimately holds us all in his hands. And that's why I love this passage from Psalm 46 we read a moment ago. God is our refuge and strength, a refuge and strength, a help always near in times of great trouble. That's why we won't be afraid when the world falls apart. Now, we choose that, right? The world feels like it's falling apart sometimes, and we choose to believe that there is a God in the heavens who walks with us through his Holy Spirit, and we are not alone, and no matter what happens, God is still gonna walk with us, so I don't have to be afraid. This is why we say sometimes, the worst thing is never the last thing. We saw that even in Jesus' death and resurrection, life conquered death and love conquered hate, and we believe in this. All right, but here's the thing. fear, and I'll come back to the rest of the acronym in a minute, but fear is something that's so easy to manipulate in us as humans. We all have a fear factor in our lives. We all have the amygdala that leads us to be hyper aware of possible threats to ourselves, and then people can use that to be able to manipulate us. I remember Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist and media consultant, said this, fear is the simplest emotion to tweak in a campaign ad. You associate your opponent with terror, with fear, with crime, with causing pain and uncertainty, and people are more likely to vote for you. And I was speaking with a political strategist the other day, a guy who's really involved in politics. And I said, you know, here's what I long for is because we're moving into the 2028 elections, right? And this fall, it's going to be really heating up. And what I would really long for is for candidates who will say, look, you know, this person is, you know, he's my fellow American or she's my fellow, maybe even a fellow Christian. And I care about them. And I think they're a good person. We disagree on some things and here's what we disagree on and here's why.

17:13 And then make the case for the position that you have and why it's a better position, as opposed to telling me terrible things about that person that are trying to make me afraid. And here's what he said. He said, Adam, you cannot make that case in 30-second and 60-second commercials. But you can make the case that you should be afraid of somebody in 30 seconds or 60 seconds, which is why those commercials are so powerful, which is why when we come to this fall, I'm hoping every time you see a negative commercial ad, you'll go, I better check that out and see if that's really true, as opposed to allowing it to shape your views of other people. All right, so face your fears with faith. That's the first in the acronym for fear. The second is examine your fears in the light of the facts. Examine your fears in the light of the facts. We'll talk more about that today in just a moment. Attack your anxiety with action. And we'll talk more about that next week. So when you're fearful, do something. Don't just, you know, mull over your fears, but do something. And then finally, release your cares to God. So God, I'm afraid, but I'm gonna trust in you.

18:08 And all of these things help us to not be afraid. Now this week, the story that made the news most often And so I watch the news every night this week. I also, I have on my phone, the news comes up. There are news feeds. And maybe yours looked like this if you're using your phone. These kind of news feeds, there they are. And you know, every one of these on this particular set of stories, we're all about ICE and Minneapolis and the killing of Renee Good and just a lot of fear related to this and what's going on. And every night, the evening news, this was the top story on the evening news. so even here you know we understand president trump was elected in large part because there had been an unprecedented number of uh undocumented immigrants who came to our country in the three or four years before that actually the first three years of biden's presidency dropped in the fourth year and so there were a lot of people who were fearful and concerned about that and you know something needs to be done as president trump promised he would do something about that and that's what he's doing right now as we look at ice um he's fulfilling this promise whether you agree with that or disagree with that or you like how it's being done or don't like how it's being done. But that's what we're seeing right now in Minneapolis, right? But here's the thing, when, again, you can have policies or ideas, but be very careful about stoking people's fears about other people when it comes to how you implement those policies or how you look at them. This week, I was on the Department of Homeland Security website. This is the website. And this was a headline that I heard in a number of different places from government agencies. ICE arrests worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens, including child rapist murderers and violent domestic abusers.

19:40 Now, when you read the headline, you go, well, good. I mean, nobody wants these people out running around in our cities. So then you think, well, if that's what they're doing, then who could not be in favor of that? And I certainly want people who have committed these kind of crimes not to be roaming free in our streets. But then people stopped and said, is that actually all the people they're arresting? Certainly there were pictures of seven of those people that they were arresting. So there were different groups that had actually taken the time to look into this. The Libertarian Cato organization or institute. Cato Institute tends to lean more conservative, but they have a more positive view of immigration. And so Libertarians, they studied this as did the Fox News affiliate in Minneapolis. And here's what they found. Of the 2,400 people that have been arrested, only 5% were violent criminals. So 95% didn't fit the headline. But when you read the headline, you go, okay, this is okay, this is all right, and maybe I should even be afraid of those people who are undocumented immigrants.

20:40 I read this week, and part of what happens when you have stories like this is then you find yourself being afraid of people who look different than you or people who might fit that profile, even if you don't know that they fit the profile or not. So this week I was reading this letter to the editor in the New York Times from a reader just north of Plano. So you know there's Dallas in the Dallas area. There's Dallas, then Richardson, then Plano, and then this is a suburb just north of that. A lot of professional people who are living in the suburb where this man is from. He says, I'm a Hispanic American and a United States citizen by birth who believes deeply in the foundational tenets of this nation. But for the first time in my 42 years, I live in fear. Fear that I'll be stopped because I look the way I look or because I was overheard speaking Spanish to my wife or son, both American citizens. Fear that I looked at an agent the wrong way. or that we won't have our passports on us when we're stopped, and why would we? We're American citizens.

21:35 Fear that I'll say the wrong thing, and that even if my words are justified, I'll be beaten or taken, or worse, my family will be. Fear that my son will witness it and have to live with that memory. Fear of ultimately being disappeared. What a wild thing to write in America that I'm afraid of being disappeared. He says, I live in fear in my own country despite having worked my way into senior roles at Fortune 50 companies, despite having paid my dues, despite having taken nothing from anyone, despite doing things the right way, I live in fear and there is little else I can do but write letters like this one because I have dwindling faith that my representatives in Congress have either the willingness or the ability to help. Isaac Pagan, Chilina, Texas. at 7.30 this morning, I preached in our Wesley Chapel. And there's a couple of folks who were in there who are a part of our congregation, a Latino dad and his son.

22:29 His son's a teenager. And after the service, they both came up to me and said, thank you so much for saying what you did. Because this is the story. You know, this is what it feels like when you're a person, a Latino person. And this is the headlines. And I thank them for their words. and I just told them how much I care about them and as a congregation, we love them and are sorry that they're feeling that kind of fear. And then before I walked out the door, the 16-year, I think he was 16 or 15-year-old son just reached over and just hugged me, tears in his eyes. I want you to be the kind of people that when people are afraid, they know they can turn to you and you're gonna stand with them and you're gonna care for them and love them and you're empathetic enough to understand what does it feel like to walk in somebody else's shoes? What does it feel like to be in this country today if you're a Latino or even Native American or somebody whose skin color just doesn't look Caucasian?

23:25 Like what does it feel like for some of these? like this man, Isaac Pagan, or this father and son who were at our 7.30 service this morning. Now, whether it's political parties or political policies, it's important for us to understand and to see things through the eyes of somebody else. I think about in Minneapolis, you know, what it's like not only for the Latino people who are afraid of ICE coming and arresting people, but I think about the ICE agents too. What's it like to be an ICE agent today? You know, and I looked at, you know, the ICE agents I was seeing in some of the stories and some of them were Latino, some of them were African-American and obviously some Caucasian. And now they're going into a community and they've been told this is your job is to find people who are undocumented. You're gonna arrest some people who aren't and then you're gonna let them go. But, you know, this is your job. And then you show up and there are a lot of people who are trying to stand with their Latino friends and they're blowing whistles and yelling and shouting and they're, you know, and sometimes they're hurling insults at you, right?

24:23 And what does that feel like for those folks who are just trying to do their job and they think this is what, you know, the right thing to do, undocumented people and they're trying to find the worst of the worst and picking up a whole lot of other people too. And I feel some empathy. I do feel empathy for them too. What does it feel like to have that job? And then I think about what happened with Renee Good and as I watched the story, I'm sure you did too. I watched it over and over again. I watched the different video angles and footages and it became a culture war issue once more. It's like all of a sudden this thing that happened is now, you know, a thing that we're all fighting over how we interpret the video clips. And I was thinking two things. You know, first of all, I was thinking about Renee Good and I'm thinking, here's a woman who has three kids and she shows up and parks her car in the middle of the street and she starts blowing a whistle through the neighborhood because she's concerned for the Latinos in the neighborhood. That sounds like the kind of thing some of you would do if this was happening here in Kansas City.

25:16 Some of you would be totally against that. But some of you would say, I need to go help my Latino friends, you know, who I'm worried might be arrested inadvertently or intentionally. And so here she is, you know, took some courage to go out and do that. And whether it was the right thing to do or not. And then there are the ICE agents and they're having people saying things to them and blowing whistles. And suddenly, you know, you find yourself in the middle of this moment. And when you've got tensions ratcheted up and fears and anger and all these things going on, it's easy to hit the gas pedal as you're trying to pull away. and maybe it's easy if you're an ICE agent who six months earlier had been drug by a car down 300 yards down the road and ended up with 24 stitches down your arm. It might be easy that you'd pull out your gun when that car starts coming towards you without stopping to think about what am I doing and suddenly you find a tragic, terrible event where a woman who was protesting is killed and a man's life is gonna be affected by this and it's the whole thing.

26:14 It's like a recipe for something tragic happening. So I want to say just a little word about how we protest. If you're somebody who would protest or show up, you know, things like that. So I remember in Black Lives Matter, it was 20, I think it was 2020. I can't remember exactly when this event happened, but there was protests that were happening on the plaza. And in the J.C. Nichols Park, there was a beautiful fountain down there. There were hundreds and hundreds of people gathered there, families with children. And they had, you know, they were just coming out to say, we just don't think this is right. And we don't want to be this kind of community where a person could be put to death while they're being arrested. And the police officers were there because things had happened a few nights before and the plaza, you know, buildings had been, you know, windows had been broken out. And so the police were in tactical gear on one side of the street and I was standing on the side with all the, you know, protesters on the other side and most of them were just very peaceful and it was, and then there were people who went up to the front of the, you know, the edge of the street and they started hurling insults at the police, and saying cruel things about them.

27:14 And I'm like, stop already. Just stop. That's not, you're standing here to protest against inhumanity and then you're acting inhuman and you're treating people on the other side of the street as though they're something less than human. That's just not how we do it. Somehow, we have to be able to articulate our opinions, our political opinions, our convictions with love. I'm reminded of what the Apostle Paul said. He said in Ephesians 4.29, and let no unclean words come out of your mouth, but only what is useful for building others up as there is need, that your words may give grace to those who hear. Like you can disagree vehemently, but you can disagree in love, but you have to be intentional about that because in the middle of it, your feelings get all riled up and you find yourself getting really angry. But you see, anger and hate never actually leads to anything positive. I love how the apostle Paul says this, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

28:11 which leads me back to Jesus' words from the Sermon on the Mount. He said, you have heard that it was said, you must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you so that you will be acting as children of your Father in heaven. That's the Republicans, that's the Democrats, that's the liberals, that's the conservatives, that's the undocumented immigrants who are here and that's the ICE agents who are there. How do we practice those words of Jesus? Now on this Dr. King weekend, I want to pause to consider a few ways that fear has played a role in racial segregation. So this week I was working on my sermon on Tuesday night, and I was reading something that Alvin Brooks had written. Alvin Brooks, some of you know him, he's 93 years old, one of the leading civil rights figures in Kansas City. I've known him for a long time. I really love this man. And Alvin had, well, he was one of the first two dozen African-American police officers for the Kansas City Police Department.

29:07 This was in the 1950s. He went on after Dr. King's death and murder assassination in 1968. He was appointed to lead up, to actually start and lead the Human Relations Council here in Kansas City to look at addressing racism and bringing people together. In 1977, he started the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime. He was also the mayor pro tem here in Kansas City. He was just involved in so many different ways in the Kansas City area. He was assistant city manager. and President George H.W. Bush named him as one of the thousand points of light, if you remember that speech back in the day. And so anyway, I was reading this about him and something he'd said, and I thought, you know, it'd be really great to interview him for the sermon today. And, but you know, it was Tuesday night at midnight. So I sent an email to him and I said, hey, Alvin, could I interview? You know, I assumed he'd get the email the next day. Alvin, can I interview this week? And maybe we could talk and you can help me with my sermon.

30:00 And 15 minutes later, he responds, hey, Pastor Adam, great to hear from you. Sure, I'd love to be interviewed. I'm like, what are you doing up at 12, 15 in the morning? You are 93 years old. And he said, no, this is my best time to work from 10 in the morning or 10 at night until two in the morning. I'm up every night. I'm writing another book. I'm like, are you kidding me? You're writing another book? And he was just elected last year at 92 to the Hickman Mills School Board. Don't you just love that? He's just such a great guy. Anyway, so we talked for about two hours on Wednesday and I asked him at one point, tell me where you see fear playing a role in racial segregation. And he tells the story you're about to hear. Now, it was about 1960, and he and his wife had just bought their first home in about 34th and Agnes, about 34th and Prospect. And it was a white working class neighborhood, and they'd bought this home. And then shortly after that, there were a couple other African-American families, or maybe even before, that had bought homes in that neighborhood.

30:54 But it was still a vast majority of people who owned their homes that were white. And he said, and then he described the blockbusting practice. Some of you may remember this, where sometimes realtors would actually even help somebody, an African-American family, buy a home, and then they would go to all the white homes and they would say to the white homeowners, you know, you have a black family living in your neighborhood now. Your property value is gonna decline. Maybe crime come into your community. You should sell your house and I'll be happy to list it for you. And then they would get 10 or 12 listings from the neighbors who lived in the neighborhood. And then you'd put all those houses on the market and the prices would plummet. Anyway, he described, you know, I knew this, but he described his experience of it. And he talked about one day when there was a gathering of the white neighborhood, you know, the people in the neighborhood and some blacks too, the handful that were living there, and then the realtors, and they were having this conversation together. And he gets up and takes the microphone. Take a listen. So I took the microphone. They had a microphone where you could go up and ask questions. So I turned the mic around where I could speak to the audience, and these real estate people, realtors, were behind me. And I said, how many of you in here have had Econ 101?

32:04 You know, that's kind of strange. A few people wouldn't have. I said, okay, let me ask this question. Let me ask it this way. If you're buying something, cars, clothes, shoes, whatever, and there's an abundance of it, overwhelming them, what happens to the price? They said, go down. I said, if there's a scarcity, it goes up. How many of you had one of these men or others to knock on your door and ask you to sell because the Negroes are coming in?

32:37 Everybody raised their hand. I said, oh, don't you think that's racism? I said, okay, so they're the one that's creating the problem, not us. They're creating fear in you that we're going to cause you a problem, but it's because all of you are putting your house on the market and flooding the market. that's why because if these are the ones behind me that are causing you to panic and for me because of us we walk out so i give that an example because i think that same kind of fear exists today the same kind of fear does exist today it's just manifest in different ways now what was interesting is uh well here was one of the questions i had for you is if you'd been living in 1960 at 34th and Agnes, and the realtors had tried to scare you into selling your house, would you have listed it?

33:31 And you know, half the people sold their homes, listed them right away. But the other half didn't. The other half stayed, and they welcomed their neighbors, and they loved them, and they continued to be, you know, the community there. One chose to give in to fear, and the other chose, in the face of fear, a different path. Now, I want to say this. In 1968, just after Dr. King died, shortly after that, the Fair Housing Act was passed. And the Fair Housing Act said blockbusting is no longer allowed. And a whole host of other things that used to be permissible, redlining and other things, were then forbidden. You could no longer keep from renting your apartment or your home to somebody of a different color or a different race. And you know why that passed? it passed because there were people like you and there were realtors who said this is not right and something has to change but see somebody had to have the courage to do that and in the years since i was talking to a realtor right after the last service and in the years since you know there have been realtors who've continued to fight to make sure that there were fair housing practices and work to see that you know because there were subtle ways of sort of working around this and they worked really hard to say no we want to make sure that when it comes to housing there's equity There's justice, there's fairness that's happening in our communities.

34:49 I'm reminded of the words of 1 John. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. All right, I wanna end with this important idea. When you're afraid, it's important to examine the facts. So to actually look at the facts. And this is what I appreciated about the Cato Institute and what they did in checking out the truth about who was being arrested. It's what I appreciate about the New York Times having Trump supporters that they interviewed and being able to share their feelings, their views. So looking at the facts. Now, I wanna take the fourth example of the things that we were fearful of as to help us with this. So number four was crime and violence. That was our fourth most frequently listed concern. And for younger adults, the Gen Z, it was still their fourth concern, but it was not just 35%, which is what it was for everybody else, 37% when you take it in total, but for Gen Z, it was 47 or 48% were fearful of crime and violence. Now, what stood out to me about that was I had just seen the report on what had happened with crime and violence last year in 2025. And I'd known what was happening across the last, actually the last 35 years when it comes to crime and violence. Let me just show you. These are the murder statistics, but they're similar in other forms of crime. So this is the murder rate in the United States per 100,000, 1950 to 2024.

36:09 and actually the data came out for 2025 just a week or two ago and it dropped down to here. So this is the murder rate. Now it went up during COVID. So we had a little blip but you can see the general trend had been down for some time and now the general trend has been down for the last four years in a row. But I want you to notice that the crime rate, the murder rate in America is lower than it's been, well, as far as this chart goes from 1950. But that's not the perception. The perception that we have is that we are seeing more and more and more murders all the time. Now, Kansas City's rate went up a little bit last year. We got work to do, but it's still down dramatically from where it was in the 1990s. But it's easy for somebody to manipulate you by saying, look at all the terrible violence and crime. Well, you see that on the news. What you don't see is the fact that it's gone down so dramatically, and it's as low as it was in the 1950s today. So find out the facts, which leads me to one last example.

37:04 So Chapman University, the poll I mentioned earlier, They asked about 90 different fears. And so every one of those 1,015 people who took the survey from across America answered these. And here was one of the questions they had. So I'm gonna ask this of you. So I want you to be prepared to answer, not out loud. But so here was the question. Do you strongly disagree or disagree or agree or strongly agree with the following statement? Are you ready? The government is concealing what it knows about the South Dakota crash.

37:36 What do you think? Is the government concealing what it knows or not concealing? Do you agree, disagree, strongly agree? So I thought, I don't remember a South Dakota crash. What was that? So I went online to search for it. I couldn't find it anywhere. I'm like, oh my gosh, the government really is concealing what it knows about the South Dakota crash. And then I went onto the survey and I went to question, you know, this question and they had a little asterisk said, this is a question we put in just to test people. There was no South Dakota crash. We made it all up. Do you know what percentage of people said they agree or strongly agree that the government was concealing information? 43%. 430 of the 1,000 Americans who took the survey believe when they saw the question that the government was concealing information about something that never happened and that the survey creators made up. You see how easily we can find ourselves giving into fear even with a question. They're after us, right? We got to be careful of those people. All right, I end with Dr.

38:36 King's words. Dr. King said this, actually before I read these words, kind of say from my heart, I just look around at our country and I think we can do better than this. We can do better about how we treat each other and how we look at each other. I think we can do better about how we treat undocumented immigrants who are here and people of color who might be afraid of being arrested by people. I think we can do better about how we protest against people who are doing things we don't agree with. We have to do better. So Dr. King said this, fear is mastered through love. Hate is rooted in fear, and the only cure for fear hate is love. Envy, jealousy, a lack of self-confidence, a feeling of insecurity, and a haunting sense of inferiority are all rooted in fear. Is there a cure for these annoying fears that pervert our personal lives?

39:29 Yes, a deep and abiding commitment to the way of love. Perfect love, he quotes our scripture, perfect love casts out fear. Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear. Only love can do that. Let's overcome fear with love. Would you pray with me? God, we thank you for your forgiveness and grace. You know the times that we have given into fear. We have to assume certain things about other people. We have allowed for policies in our name and our country that only brought fear and magnified fear. We have given into political advertisements without checking the facts and even headlines on websites sometimes. Please forgive us. Help us in this congregation to be people who understand and live the truth that perfect love can cast out fear.

40:22 use us to be instruments of your healing oh God in this world and help us to face our fears with faith to examine our fears in the light of the facts to attack our anxieties with action and to release our cares to you and finally oh Lord help us to be mindful of our neighbors who are afraid right now and to go out of our way to express love and care for them in Jesus name