Third Sunday of Easter Sermon
By the Rev. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong
Minister for Worship and Formation in the Memorial Church
Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, April 19, 2026)
Please pray with me. We thank you, Lord God, for this opportunity to share and to ponder your word. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, Lord, our God and Redeemer. Amen. From age 10 through age 25, when I left my native Ghana for graduate school in the United States, I lived under military governments. In fact, under three different regimes. I was a second-year student at the University of Ghana when we were startled by the return of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings in his second coup d'état on December 31, 1981.
Then, the usual happened. The constitution was suspended. Parliament closed. Political parties were banned, and the military government ruled by decree. In the absence of institutions for the expression of political difference, university campuses became sites of dissent, and a three-year degree became four years because of repeated university closures. I stayed on at the University of Ghana beyond college as a teaching assistant, and then as a graduate student. The university closures continued. I relocated to the United States in 1987 to pursue graduate education. In the United States, I heard for the first time a phrase that resonated with me greatly, speaking truth to power. It captured the experience of our campus life between 1982 and 1987.
In our reading from Acts this morning, Peter spoke truth to power. He did this at great risk to himself. Jesus, the Messiah, he preached about on that faithful Pentecost day, had been recently executed by the Roman authorities at the instigation of Jewish religious leaders. Jesus was the second person close to this circle of disciples to be executed. The first was John the Baptist, whose followers were among the earliest disciples of Jesus. The trial and execution of Jesus was a terrible experience for his followers. Not only did they abandon him on his arrest, but Peter would also deny him thrice in the compound of the high priest's house, where Jesus was being tried.
On Resurrection Sunday, the Gospel of John narrates how Mary Magdalene went early in the morning to the tomb and found it empty and returned to tell Peter and John. Peter and John ran to the tomb to see for themselves. Indeed, the tomb was empty, and they returned to their homes. Mary Magdalene refused to leave the empty tomb. She wanted resolution and needed to know what had happened to her rabbi. Her reward was that she was the first person to see the resurrected Christ in the Gospel of John. Reverend Matt Potts, in his Easter Sunday sermon, noted that the Greek word for Peter and John, returning to their homes at another level meant to turn in on themselves, a return to their old lives before they met Jesus.
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were returning home, disappointed at the rather anti-climactic death of the rabbi and prophet Jesus. As they explained to the stranger who had joined them on the road, "But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel." Despite Jesus' repeated teaching that he would be killed and will resurrect on the third day, his followers chose to hold onto the traditional expectations of the Messiah, a political leader with access to military power who will liberate Israel from its oppressors. The Gospel of John records an encounter between the resurrected Jesus and his disciples, including Peter. That confirms that the disciples turn in on themselves and helps me to understand the transformed Peter on the day of Pentecost.
Significantly, Jesus called Peter to follow him on two occasions. Both were by the lake of Gennesaret or the sea of Galilee. In the first call, Simon Peter and Andrew, his brother Andrew, left their fishing nets to follow Jesus. The second call is the fishing incident recorded in the last chapter of John when Peter seemed to have returned to his old trade. The reason Lord appears at the beach and asks Peter thrice, "Do you love me?" It is as if Jesus asked Peter thrice to reverse the three times Peter denied him. The gospel tells us that Peter felt hurt the third time that Christ asked him, "Do you love me?" Peter's response, "Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you." This encounter on the beach was instrumental to the restoration of Peter as an apostle of Christ and the leader of the early church.
Psalm 116 ties in well with Peter's Pentecost message for it shed slight on Peter's bravery at Pentecost after his restoration. The German theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writes that costly grace is the incarnation of God. Bonhoeffer notes that grace is costly because it cost God the life of his son, and what has cost God cannot be cheap for us. Peter received his apostolic life back when Christ affirmed his call the second time. In Psalm 116, the Psalmist declares his love for God because he cried out to God when he was threatened by sickness and impending death and the Lord saved him. In response, the Psalmist pledges to lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord and to pay his vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
His redemption was too overwhelming to require a private response. He would offer public thanksgiving and a public fulfillment of his responsibilities to God. This is how we find Peter on Pentecost Day, bearing witness to what God had done for him. In Acts 1, Jesus commanded the disciples not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father. That when they receive the Spirit, they will be witnesses to the message of the cross to the ends of the Earth. The arrival of the Spirit on Pentecost confirmed that the crucifixion and resurrection constituted the core message Jesus' followers were to take to the ends of the Earth.
Peter preached his first sermon on the resurrected Christ with the temple in Jerusalem in the background. His message was a call to discipleship. Bonhoeffer notes that in the life of Peter, grace and discipleship are inseparable. He had received the grace which caused. In response to his powerful sermon, 3000 souls were convicted by the Holy Spirit and gave their lives to Jesus that day in response to Peter's invitation that they repent and be baptized. The good news of the resurrected Christ demands to be shared. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus returned to Jerusalem in the evening once the resurrected Jesus was revealed to them in the breaking of bread. They were moved to share what they had witnessed. We are called to share the faith we have been given.
I have been reading Bonhoeffer a lot these past several weeks, as I ponder on what is expected of Christians in politically uncertain or tense times. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in April 1943 and executed in April 1945 for his active political opposition to the Nazis. The recent activities of ICE, the deaths of innocent individuals like Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and the conflicts in the Middle East have reminded me of the years of insecurity when I lived under military regimes in Ghana. In the 1982-83 academic year, the military government in Ghana closed all universities and ordered students to go and assist in the evacuation of cocoa from the rural areas. Ghana is the second leading producer of cocoa in the world. I lost a childhood friend in the process. We were in our early 20s. After loading cocoa bags onto trucks, we were expected to sit on the bags in these open-top trucks for the return to the city. My friend fell off the truck.
Government action can have unexpected outcomes. The death of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026 reminded me of my friend's death. None of them left home on the day of their deaths expecting not to return home. Nicole Good was a mother of three, a stay-at-home mom who loved singing and was described as a compassionate Christian. She was out to support neighbors when she was killed. Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse who had protested the killing of Renee Good earlier in January. His parents had cautioned him to be careful in the protest. As I think of these untimely deaths, I'm comforted by the verse from Psalm 116, which states that precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones. These deaths are costly because the sound is about how God wills life and works to make life a reality.
I ask myself, "Were Renee Good and Pretti at the wrong place, at the wrong time?" Bonhoeffer tells me in life together that it is the fellowship of the cross to experience the burden of the other. If one does not experience it, the fellowship he belongs to is not Christian. If any member refuses to bear the burden, he denies the law of Christ. For Bonhoeffer, if we wished to truly live, we must be prepared to die. Though this sounds radical to us, Bonhoeffer was simply adhering to traditional Orthodox Christianity. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, "And he who does not take his cross and follow me, is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it. And he who loses his life for my sake will find it."
Bonhoeffer, in a letter from prison to his fiancée, Maria, in August 1943, opined, "I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon Earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." For him, the life of the church must be linked with the life of the people. Costly grace requires that Christians bear witness to the good news of our resurrected Lord. The Theologian, Gary Neal Hansen, stresses that we should be a people constantly responding to the meaning of the resurrection, a resurrection to which the Spirit testifies on a daily basis. Otherwise, we risk falling into cheap grace, which for Bonhoeffer, is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Bearing witness comes in many forms. As I drove to campus last Friday morning, the sight of 20 senior citizens at the corner of Emerson Hospital on Route Two in Concord lifted my spirits. They held up placards with messages such as "Might does not make right. No king then, no king now. Protect our democracy." There is an assisted living facility down the street. These senior citizens had decided on the line of action for that morning. What should we do? This is the question those convicted by Peter's sermon on Pentecost asked him. This is a question we should ask ourselves every day over the course of our Christian life. Amen.