But the single reason all of us are really here this morning is an earthquake, an earthquake that happened two thousand years ago on the first Easter Sunday. Was it a literal earthquake? Maybe it was. But something powerful took place that shook up a lot of people and shook the foundations of the world as we know it, because what had been a tiny—and I mean tiny—group of Jewish believers had given up one day, and were out changing the world a few days later. Whatever happened in that garden tomb was powerful enough to change lives, to shape cultures and alter history, to create a global church that has lasted over all those years right up to this very moment. We’re here in this sanctuary today because the Resurrection of Jesus Christ shook the foundations centuries ago, and the effects, the tremors are still reverberating.

So whether you’ve come this morning with bells on, or you are here a bit more reluctantly, earthquakes don’t discriminate, and there’s good news for all with ears to hear.

Matthew’s telling of the Easter story stresses the emotions of the characters, but the feeling that he conveys most is fear. At the tomb, the guards are afraid and the women are afraid; the angel tells the women not to be afraid, as does the risen Jesus later on, and as they leave to tell the others, Matthew tells us they go with a strange mixture of fear and joy. I guess that’s not really so surprising: there were some very strange things going on involving tombs and bodies, and the stakes were high. But notice how different the guards and the women respond to that fear.

The guards have fear and to them it is just plain terror. They feel an earthquake, see a figure come out of the sky and watch as the angel rolls the stone back from the tomb, and Matthew says, “for fear of him, the guards shook and became like dead men.” And can you blame them? When I was growing up my friends and I hung out at the local railroad station, waiting for trains to come by and passing the time as boys do. And across the parking lot of the station was Union Cemetery. At the far end of the cemetery, of course at the loneliest spot along the railroad tracks, there was a crypt, the kind dug into a high piece of ground with a vertical stone face set into the hill. Above the door was engraved simply the family name “Judd” and the year 1888. And one day at the train station we noticed that the stone door of this crypt just wasn’t there. We weren’t sure if it had recently been removed, or if it never had been sealed and we just hadn’t noticed. Either way, we spent the next few weeks daring each other, at first to just go into the crypt, and then to sit in it for longer and longer periods of time. And the terror I felt each time, and the terror that eventually made me stop going when we talked about going at night—well, I can relate to those guards. Confronted with something way out of the ordinary, something unknown, especially having to do with death, something that just doesn’t fit with normal thinking or everyday life, fear can simply overcome us and become terror: earthquakes, thunder, open graves, strange lights in the sky, emergency rooms, nightmares.

Mary Magdelene and the other Mary also experience this same earthquake, this same angel descending, this same stone miraculously dislodged right before their eyes. But while they are also afraid, their fear does not paralyze them like the guards’. Instead, what do they do? The angel says, “Come, see the place where he lay,” and the women go into the tomb. They go into the tomb! Why? Because their trust in who Jesus was, in what Jesus had done and said to them, was strong enough for them to step into the last place they probably wanted to go, the place where they would have expected—and maybe even still did expect—to see Jesus’ lifeless body.

And did you notice: the stone was not rolled away to allow Jesus to get out—he had already been resurrected and was on his way before the angel rolled it away. No, the stone was rolled away to allow the women to go in, to allow the women to confront their fears: the fear that their past would just continue as it had been, the fear that Jesus hadn’t been telling the truth, the fear that life really was as dismal as it had been before they met Jesus, the fear that this friend they cared for really was dead and gone. And when they see that the tomb is empty, all those fears are ended. They don’t know what’s next, but they see they no longer have to be so afraid. The angel assures them that what they hoped for was exactly what had happened, and that if they could carry on, could move forward in their lives and go with the others to Galilee, they would meet their friend again.

Friends, Easter is all about joy, but that joy becomes real and becomes more than just a nice idea—and here’s the uncomfortable part of the morning—when you and I go into the tomb and confront our fears. If we won’t, or can’t, or don’t know how to face all the baggage and fear from our past, if we won’t allow the earthquake to shake us up and rearrange our priorities, we end up just standing paralyzed outside the tomb like the guards, afraid of life and not living it. Easter is THE invitation to let go of all our fears and to receive the assurance that they cannot undo us, and that if we will get up and go to Galilee, get up and go through our lives trusting in the promises, we will meet the risen Christ on the way.

What tomb do you stand outside of each day, fearful to go in? Maybe it is as big as the old and persistent fear of death itself, or the death of ones we love. But it could also be that old fear of failing, of losing control, of breaking routine, of saying yes when you want to say no, or no when you want to say yes. Perhaps the tomb you don’t want to enter is acknowledging a wrong that was done to you long ago, or just this week, or a wrong you did to someone else that has haunted you ever since. Maybe the tomb holds a too-familiar habit you don’t want to acknowledge, or an ancient hatred you don’t want to confess, or a mistake you made about which you have unceasing guilt, or a persistent circumstance that seems so unchangeable you stopped hoping it could ever be different a long time ago. The good news of Easter Sunday is that God overcomes every old fear we carry. But, like the women, we have to go into the tomb and see for ourselves those fears are empty, groundless, not what really matters. And when we see that, realize that, we can then move forward into tomorrow and into the rest of our lives, confident that Christ, our strength and sustainer, will be there to meet us along the way.

No matter what you think about Barack Obama as a candidate, positive or negative, set it aside and consider his speech about racism this week in light of what those women did at the tomb. Obama spoke bluntly about racism in a way that few political personalities have. He named it in all its past and present ugliness. He described how painful and poisonous it has been, for both black and white Americans, and said it simply can’t continue if the country is to evolve into what we hope it will be. Obama didn’t solve the problem at all, but his words drew us into the tomb of racial tension. He articulated what you and I know deep down, about racism or any other deeply rooted fear: unless we confront it, see it for what it really is, we will continue to be paralyzed by it, like the guards outside the tomb, guards who would never know the way God offers out of the awful burden of past mistakes and fears.

We talk about how on Easter everything is made new, and maybe we can be a little more like those brave women, maybe we can feel the earth shaking power of Easter a little more fully by working to let go of so much from our personal past that is burying us. Billy Collins was America’s poet laureate for a time, and he once wrote a poem one fall day while listening to a Strauss waltz, and he called it, “Some Final Words.”

I cannot leave you without saying this:
the past is nothing,
a nonmemory, a phantom,
a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss
is composing another waltz no one can hear.

It is a fabrication, best forgotten,
a wellspring of sorrow
that waters a field of bitter vegetation.

Leave it behind.
Take your head out of your hands
and arise from the couch of melancholy
where the window-light falls against your face
and the sun rides across the autumn sky,
steely behind the bare trees,
glorious as the high strains of violins.

But forget Strauss
with that encore look in his eye
and his tiresome industry:
more than five hundred finished compositions!
He even wrote a polka for his mother.
That alone is enough to make me flee the past,
evacuate its temples,
and walk alone under the stars
down these dark paths strewn with acorns,
feeling nothing but the crisp October air,
the swing of my arms
and the rhythm of my stepping—
a man of the present who has forgotten
every composer, every great battle,
just me,
a thin reed blowing in the night.