happy birthday

Good morning, Sunday: "Welcome, happy morning!" age to age shall say.

We don't read an Old Testament lesson during these Sundays of Easter, instead we hear readings from Acts and another New Testament book, this year 1 Peter. In our Acts reading today we hear about the death of Stephen, traditionally the Church's first martyr for the Lord Jesus:

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Acts 7:55-60

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Stephen gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died.

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Not Stephen's testimony, which is a long story of the salvation history of Israel, but his blasphemy, condemnation, stoning and the moment of his death, when we are told that a young man named Saul was standing there holding the coats of Stephen's executioners.

This scene sets the stage for Saul, later the Apostle Paul, who appears a chapter or so later in Acts, to be confronted by Jesus whom he is persecuting; whereupon Saul is led to Christ in a dramatic conversion so fervent that Saul, Paul, spends the rest of his life as the first Christian evangelist, traveling around the Roman Empire preaching Christ.

And, by tradition, Paul himself being martyred, in Rome about 62 AD. The entire second half of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles is devoted to Paul's travels, four journeys, preaching Christ crucified and risen.

Then of course, on his own, not Luke's story about Paul in Acts, but Paul himself writing letters to various churches, the epistles of Paul that eventually form the major part of our New Testament. In fact, not from Jesus in the gospels that were written some decades later, but from Paul we get the basis of our Christian theology and doctrine of Christ dying to save us from damnation for our sins.

But for now, almost as an aside, but subtly to introduce Saul, we are to note that Saul/Paul is there as an approving witness to the stoning of Stephen. In fact, Saul had made it his personal calling to seek out fellow Jews who are claiming Jesus as Christ and Lord, and bring them in chains for trial and execution.

It's not my day in the pulpit, I'm up about one in four this year, my next turn is next week, Easter Six, which is Mothers Day.

Which brings me round to my awareness for this day, May 7. Today is my mother's birthday anniversary: May 7, 1912, a hundred-eleven years ago. She was born near Century at Bluff Springs, Florida, which is some miles north of Pensacola, out US 29, just this side of the Alabama line, to Mamie McClammy Gentry and Walter Henry Gentry.

Mama's birth name was Hazel Louise Gentry, but she so disliked the name Hazel that none of us was ever allowed to tell it. At some point, may have been 1955 when Holy Nativity Episcopal Church was being organized, that whoever was setting up the Parish Register asked my father her full name, and he said Hazel Louise Gentry Weller, and she was duly recorded as Hazel, and for a while addressed as Hazel Weller, and my father was the rest of his life hearing about it.

Mama's grandparents were a farm family. Around here somewhere, I have to be more careful about losing track of old family photographs, is a large picture of the Gentry family, my grandfather standing by Mamie and Louise, my mama and her brother Wilbur, and all his brothers and sisters with their spouses and little children, standing out front of the house with his parents, who are seated and suitably dressed for what I understand was their wedding anniversary. My great-grandmother in her wedding dress, and my great-grandfather, with a long white beard, in coat and tie. The house is one of those old unpainted farm houses that we used to see all around north Florida all my growing up years, with a shanty-type porch on front. Which is where the photograph was taken.

When mama was very small, maybe two or so, her parents moved into Pensacola, where my grandfather joined two or three of his brothers in their business that they had established in 1909. There was Uncle Lee, whom I do not remember, and Uncle Eb, Elbert, whom I do remember, and whose grave I found some years ago in St John's Cemetery in Pensacola.

Uncle Eb died in the early 1940s, leaving my grandfather Walter, whom we called Daddy Walt (for whom my brother is named, Walter Gentry Weller), as the sole proprietor of Gentry Bros, Loans & Pawns in downtown Pensacola.

In my early lifetime, Gentry Bros was in several locations, most recently and finally at 10 East Intendencia, just off Palafox. I think the building was torn down and there was an empty lot for parking the last Time I drove by the location. Daddy Walt liked to say, "I'm Walter Gentry, Gentry Brothers, been in business since Nine." To which, years later, my mother would clarify, Since Jesus was a boy.

New to Pensacola, the Gentry family lived in a rented house on the north side of the 1300 block of East Strong Street in East Hill, just a block off Cervantes. A couple of years later, the house directly across the street, at 1317 E. Strong Street, came up for sale, my grandfather bought it, and one of Mama's earliest memories was of relatives and neighbors helping carry furniture, lamps, stacks of dishes, and clothes on coat hangers, across the street to their new home.

Mama and her brothers and sisters grew up there, it's the house of earliest and dearest memories to me, visiting grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins; a residential block with the sidewalk where I learned to skate when I got my first pair of roller skates for Christmas when I was maybe seven or eight years old.

Except for downtown on Harrison Avenue, we did not have sidewalks in Panama City, which was all dirt roads when I was a boy.

Louise Gentry at 1317 E. Strong Stree, and living just a few blocks apart, my parents met as students at Pensacola High School during the year or two in the 1920s that my Weller grandparents and family were living in Pensacola during their sojourn after the death of my father's brother Alfred. Again misplaced, there's another photograph around here somewhere, of a young teen couple that on the back is written Louise 16 and Tom 17. My father stole my mother away from her boyfriend, Tom DeWeese. We found that old photograph, which would have been, what? 1912 + 16 = 1928?, in looking through mama's things after she died in July 2011 at age 99. I guarantee, my father never knew that mama had saved that old picture of her and Tom.

An old newspaper lists my father, Carroll Weller, and Tom DeWeese, as teammates for the Pensacola Tigers football team one year. The next year, my Weller family had finally moved back to St Andrews, and an old newspaper lists Carroll Weller playing for the Bay High Tornadoes against Pensacola High, where Tom is still listed playing for the Tigers.

This brings me to my closing memory, which I've told here before. The fall of 1941, on the Monday that was Labor Day, before I was to start first grade at Cove School the next morning, Mama called me into the dining room and said, "Bubba, you're starting school tomorrow. What do you want them to call you?"

Thinking, I said, "Not Bubba. What about Tom?"

Mama said, "No, it can't be Tom. When I was in high school I had a boyfriend named Tom, and your daddy still hates him."

Very reluctantly, with deepest reluctance that I specifically remember, I agreed to be called Carroll, which my father was called. So I grew up, from age 5 going on 6 starting Cove School, until my 18th birthday when I started as a freshman at the University of Florida, I was Carroll Weller, Jr.

For me, it was not unlike Johnny Cash's song, "A Boy Named Sue." Constantly explain. No, it's spelled with two "R's" and two "L's" because my father was named Thomas Carroll Weller in honor of an uncle named John Thomas Carroll, and for some reason my father was always called Carroll. So, I'm Carroll, Junior.

Jiminy Jeepers.

Once registered at Florida, as they called the roll in classes, my professors re-christened me Tom Weller.

RSF&PTL