Dr Villo Naleo
Secretary, Social Concern, NBCC
Lamentations 3:19-24. I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’S great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore, I will wait for him.”
Heavenly Father,
We come before You through Your Son, Jesus Christ, and we stand in awe of Your holy and solemn presence. We acknowledge that our history is not hidden from You. You have seen our journeys, our struggles, our wanderings, our victories and our wounds. You know our people, our land, our identity, and our longing for nationhood.
You are the God who stands above history and yet enters into history. You are the Lord of nations and the keeper of generations. You know the rise and fall of kingdoms; You see the prosperity of rulers who pursue righteousness and the devastation caused by tyrants who reject justice and despise Your purposes.
Kings rise and kingdoms fall. Empires appear and disappear. Palaces are built and eventually crumble. Governments change, boundaries shift, and generations pass. But You remain.
You have set Yourself above every kingdom, every palace, every government, every empire and every tribe. No empire is eternal. No power is absolute. No ruler sits beyond Your judgment. No nation is beyond Your sovereignty.
And through the storms of history-through persecution, rejection of truth, the assault upon faith, and the rise of ideologies that deny You—you have taught us to count the cost of discipleship. You have taught us that faith is not merely a possession to be inherited but a conviction to be lived, defended and embodied.
You did not allow others to define our worth by our nakedness, our primitiveness, our poverty, or our distance from the centres of power. Nor did You measure us by the standards of those who conquered, classified or judged us. Instead, through the wounds of history, You awakened within us a deeper appreciation for who we are.
You taught us to value our indigeneity. You taught us to cherish our culture. You taught us to remember our ancestors. You taught us to protect our land. You taught us to treasure our stories.
And You taught us that innocence is not weakness and simplicity is not inferiority.
At times, we have laughed at our own follies. At times, we have been stubborn enough to resist foreign ideas imposed upon us. At times, we have struggled to distinguish between what must be resisted and what must be received.
Yet beneath all our contradictions, you have preserved within us a profound love-for our people, for our land, for our communities, for our history and for the space in which You have allowed us to become who we are.
Lord, You are jealous for us.
You are the God who does not desire Your people to surrender their hearts to other gods. Your jealousy is not the jealousy of human insecurity; it is the passionate love of a God who refuses to abandon His covenant people.
We are not jealous of Your love for others; we stand in awe of the relentless love You have for us. Your love has pursued us through generations. Your presence has accompanied us through uncertainty and suffering.
Our people have known what it means to flee from empire, to suffer under empire, to resist empire, to negotiate with empire, to plead before empire, and even to apologize to empire for simply seeking to exist with dignity. And after all this, today we find ourselves standing at the mercy of another empire.
Yet You were there and you will be there
You heard the cries that rose from the fields and valleys, from the mountains and forests, from the thick jungles and crowded cities, from the places where our people struggled to survive and from the quiet places where families gathered in prayer. You heard us when our voices were loud, and You heard us even when we had no voice left.
You heard the sound of our church bells, our hymns and our prayers. You heard the silence of our grief. And You have not forgotten.
Lord, perhaps You have raised something within us-not an empire of domination, but an empire of grace.
Not to subjugate others, but to serve with humility. Not to violate the dignity of others, but to defend it. Not to demean the vulnerable, but to stand beside them. Not to conquer through violence, but to overcome through love. Not to repay injustice with revenge, but to seek justice through truth and reconciliation.
You have raised churches, institutions and communities among us-not merely to preserve ourselves, but to become instruments of healing and restoration.
Teach us to speak truth in love, to confront injustice without becoming unjust. To resist oppression without becoming oppressive, to remember our wounds without becoming prisoners of our wounds and to forgive without forgetting the truth.
You have not called us to build our identity upon the weakness of others. You have called us to recognize our own weaknesses and to discover, in those very places, the everlasting strength of Your grace.
You have awakened our conscience. You have taught us determination without hatred, courage without arrogance, memory without revenge, and forgiveness without surrendering truth.
And so, Lord, we gather here today. We come together to witness and participate in the repatriation of the remains of our ancestors.
We come with reverence and humility, with questions and memories. We come with wounds that have travelled across histories and generations.
We do not presume to know what this act means for those who have already entered eternity. Their earthly journey has ended, and their souls remain in Your hands.
But we know what this moment means for us.
It is an act of memory. It is an act of truth. It is an act of dignity. It is an act of healing.
We do this so that we may remember truthfully and redemptively. We do this to reclaim our collective memory and resist the forces of forgetfulness that seek to erase our story.
We refuse to allow our history to disappear into silence. We refuse to allow our ancestors to become merely objects of anthropology, specimens of history, or forgotten names in distant archives.
They were human beings. They were our ancestors. They carried stories. They carried dignity. They belonged to families, clans and communities.
And today, as we commemorate the third repatriation dialogue. We pray that you will help us to return memory to the people, truth to history, dignity to the dead, and healing to the living.
We lay our conscience bare before You. Search us, O God. Examine our motives. Purify our intentions. Remove bitterness from us. Remove the desire for revenge from us.
Holy Spirit, illuminate our minds so that we may discern what is right. Strengthen our spirits so that we may do what is courageous. Soften our hearts so that we may remain compassionate. And heal what generations have carried in silence.
Our spirits yearn for rejuvenation. Our minds hunger for illumination. Our hearts come before You willing, broken and contrite.
Therefore, Lord, as we before you: May memory become wisdom. May grief become compassion. May history become responsibility. May repentance become transformation. May truth become reconciliation. And may reconciliation become peace.
May this journey of repatriation become more than the return of ancestral remains. May it become a return of memory, healing and a return to wholeness. In the name of Jesus Christ, we pray Amen.
