Transcription
The Tribe of Benjamin. So that name makes sense because Saul was the first king of Israel. It was from the Tribe of Benjamin, so it was kind of a pride thing, right? In this, this tribe, in his and his clan, uh, Pavlos, in the Greek for which we get Paul, is a Greek name. It was very common. We've seen this a lot in the New Testament for Jewish people to also have Greek or Roman names. Uh, and this was because the Romans, in the Empire beyond Rome, all spoke Greek. And none of them cared to learn any Aramaic or Hebrew. And none of them cared to figure out how to pronounce these people's names, right? So they would have. So, so one of the famous ones is Saint Mark, who wrote St. Mark's Gospel. Was actually Saint John Mark. John was actually his given name, but he used Marcus, a Roman name, right? Or Saint Peter, right? Which was actually the Greek form of his nickname. His, his actual given name was Simeon. Uh, his nickname was Kephas, that means Rock, and Rocky essentially, right? And Petros is the Greek form, the Greek form of that. So I like to point out to people, before there was Dwayne "The Rock," there was Simon "The Rock" Bar-Jonah. But so, St. Paul had the same thing, right? He had Saul. He had, right? Paul was a name used sort of in, uh, the wider Roman world. And Tarsus was actually a major city and a city of critical importance in Roman history. Outside the Bible, Tarsus was at the mouth of a river emptying into the Mediterranean, sort of where what's now Turkey, right, bends into, oh, we've got another thing right here, um, and it was a major center of textiles. That's why we know Saint Paul learned to make tents, because everyone learned a trade in the Roman world. So this would have been when he was, our equivalent of Junior High age, he would have been apprenticed to learn to start making, start making tent flaps, mostly out of canvas at that point. Tarsus had become a major city because Tarsus made the decision to side with Julius Caesar in the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey. Pompey. And the reason that's important is that, in particular, the very large Jewish community in Tarsus had chosen to side with Caesar against Pompey. And because of that, Julius Caesar had issued a series of edicts that gave the, the Jewish people religious freedom and toleration within the Roman Empire. That had been ratified by Caesar Augustus. And that came with a citizenship grant, which is why Saint Paul is a Roman citizen. Because his father, probably his father, it might have been his grandfather, we don't have exact dates on, like, right, like his family, but probably his father, maybe his grandfather, would have been alive at that time and would have been granted citizenship by Caesar for that reason. But that meant, especially in Tarsus, the Jewish community was much more integrated into city life than in a lot of other Roman cities where they were sort of in their own district off to the side, a minority. And that allowed Saint Paul to get not just sort of the beginnings of a Jewish education in the Jewish way of life and traditions, but also, as we can see in his Epistles, a thorough-going Greco-Roman education. So he can, in First Corinthians at one point, he quotes Menander, who was a Greek comic playwright. And he'll quote, in Acts 17, when he's, he's done at the Areopagus, he quotes, "To the Unknown God." So he has this kind of wide-ranging education growing up there in Tarsus. In probably his mid-teenage years, he was sent from there to Jerusalem, which most folks, by now, know, um, he was sent to Jerusalem to study with Gamaliel, who's one of the most important rabbis in Jewish history. He only pops up a couple of times in the Bible, but if you read the Mishnah, out of the Talmud, he's everywhere. He's quoted. Everyone, he's considered one of the sages by the Jewish people to this day. Um, and he went and studied there. Uh, Saint Stephen was also a student of Gamaliel. But something happened while Paul was there. This is something we know about from places other than the Bible too. During this period in Judea, because of Roman oppression, there were a lot of what were called Zealot groups. Start. And these Zealot groups went from just, we're a political group that hates the Romans, to there's a group called the Sicarii, which Judas was probably a member of. That's probably where Sicarii comes from. They would literally go and assassinate Roman officials. And those groups are the groups that led up to the Jewish Revolt in the 60s AD, that ended up getting Jerusalem and the Temple destroyed in 70 AD. And we know there were lots of people from these Pharisaic schools, like the one Gamaliel ran in Jerusalem, we know this from outside the Bible, who were drifting into these Zealot groups. In modern terms, they were getting radicalized, right? In, in Jerusalem. And we see that Saint Paul becomes one of those. He's still Saul of Tarsus, that he becomes radicalized. He becomes particularly radicalized against the, at that point, Christian sect of Judaism, because a particular target for him. But that involved a break with Gamaliel, his teacher. It involved a break with Pharisaism. And that's part of the subtext that's going on underneath the story of Saint Stephen's martyrdom, stoning, and Saint Paul standing there. This is his former fellow student, who he's now, you know, motivating this mob to kill.
So, St. Paul takes this turn. And it's after he's taken this turn and embraced Zealotry that he has the experience he has on the road to Damascus. And I phrase it that way very deliberately because we've been taught, and this largely comes through the interpretations of Saint Augustine and then later Martin Luther, that Saint Paul converts, right? Like he's, he's on the road to Damascus, he has this vision, and he converts from Judaism to Christianity, right? Or he converts from Pharisees. In 35 AD, there were not two different religions, Judaism and Christianity. Uh, I won't go into this too far, but in 200 AD, there were not two different religions, but let alone like 35. So, uh, and Saint Paul, when he describes it in Galatians, it's described a couple of times in the book of Acts. Of Acts, Paul describes what happened. In Galatians, he describes it. He borrows all of this language from the Prophet Jeremiah and uses, uses the language that the Prophet Jeremiah used about his call to be a prophet when he saw God. It was called to be a prophet. Saint Paul uses that to describe what happened to him on the way to Damascus. And so this is, this is one of the important themes that's going to pop up here and there in the curriculum. Is this idea that Saint Paul sees this as a call. He doesn't think he's changed religions. Now, obviously, he didn't believe Jesus was a Messiah, and now he does, right? But he believed before that there was going to be a Messiah, right? He believed before that that there was going to be a Messiah. The Messiah was going to do certain things, right? It's just now he believes, "Oh, Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah," right? And so, sort of his timetable of where we are in history gets adjusted. But this idea of calling, this idea that Saint Paul believed throughout his life, and he says this over and over again, that God called him to this particular thing, and that he's willing to suffer, to eventually die, right, to go through all manner of hardships in order to be faithful to that calling that God gave him. And Saint Paul is equally clear that he thinks everyone else has callings too, just not the same one as him. This isn't that he's sort of this special, unique person, right? He's the person who got picked for this one particular thing, but God has called everybody to some particular thing, to something they're called to do. And then life is about being faithful to that calling, by whatever hardships we face, whatever difficulties we face, in the face of that. So, uh, I'm trying to travel too much. So that, that's sort of the first introductory lesson is about who Saint Paul is. Second is, uh, title, sort of, what is the Epistle to the Romans? And so we need to talk there first. And this presents interesting possibilities, I think, for activities and stuff, but how letters were written in the ancient world. Most people probably have in their head, like, St. Paul sat down with some kind of pen and quill or something, wrote this letter, like, log cabin, which is not the case. Um, St. Paul, a couple of places in his letter, says that he signed his name at the end, and he says, "Look what big letters I wrote in," because apparently, probably, he had vision problems, big, messy handwriting. Uh, so, the way it was done was, you had someone called, in Greek, an amanuensis. It's basically a secretary, kind of thing, where St. Paul would dictate this letter, the secretary would write it down longhand, and, you know, do grammar things, and make it look nice. And then St. Paul would review it, right? Because he's making a little tinkering for changes. So they called to look at it and say, "Oh, no, I didn't mean that. I mean," make whatever changes he wanted. And the secretary would carry the letter to where it was going and read it out loud to the recipient and be expected to be able to answer questions about it. So it wasn't just the secretary in terms of taking dictation, but this was a more sort of forward, right, kind of thing. We actually know who the secretary was because in Romans, Romans 16, it says, "I Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you." Which is a great, I hope that ends up being a Bible question. "Who wrote the book of Romans?" as a Bible question. So everybody says Saint Paul, and then, no churches, mainly because I won't get the angry letters afterwards. So, in that, I won't digress too much on this, but when you hear people arguing about which letters of St. Paul he wrote, and did you have to factor this in? You have different secretaries. Sometimes St. Paul is a co-author, like, say, Timothy. There's a lot of variables involved beyond just comparing. But everyone agrees St. Paul wrote this. Now, Romans in particular, that's Epistles in general. Romans in particular was written to deal with one primary problem, and then along the way, there are other little issues that are. And that's that in the mid-50s AD, Claudius expelled all the Jews from Rome. Never flies. And again, we're not making a distinction between Jews and Christians at this point. But Gentiles who were Christians were not Jews, as far as the Romans were concerned, even if they were Christians. So what happens is all of the Jewish Christians get expelled from Rome for two years. The Gentile Christians remain in Rome, and their communities continue. They keep having worshiping together, they're living together, but all the Jewish Christians are gone. This is when, uh, in Acts, this is when Saint Paul meets Saints Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth. They were important because they'd gotten thrown out of Rome, right? Because they were, they were Jewish. So after those two years, the Jews are allowed back into Rome. And so all these Jewish Christians come back to these now Gentile Christian communities. And so the main problem Saint Paul is facing is how, how do these, we reintegrate these two? Because what he didn't want there to be anywhere, let alone Rome, was a Jewish Christian church over here and a Gentile Christian church over there, that were two separate things. And so he has a whole series of then detail issues related, related to how the Jewish Christians saw themselves and their faith, how the Gentile Christians saw themselves and their faith, how they saw each other, that he's got to work through with them. As well. Let me suggest, and in our different churches and archdioceses will be different on this, this is not totally dissimilar from people from Orthodox countries, people whose families have been Orthodox for generations, and people who at some point in their life, or their parents' life, right, became part of the Orthodox Church. Because very much the Jewish Christians saw this as just their identity, right? This is our religion, this is our faith, this is the faith that all of our ancestors practiced. Jesus is our Messiah, right? And yeah, we let you guys in, you know, and that's great too, but, you know, don't get too excited, right, right? And, and you get the reverse of the Gentile ground, because it's the Gentile Christians, they're like, you know, well, first of all, you know, yeah, you say this is your religion, but I see a whole bunch of your people who are following this religion, and, uh, some of you don't follow it all that well. And by the way, we just spent the last two years keeping this place alive. This place would be dead, it wouldn't exist. So I think some of the conflicts we see in some of our parishes are totally foreign to what Saint Paul is trying to deal with here, even though it's different sort of what it's going to happen in groups and different. Right? There's a, there are some similarities there. There are some places to make connections if it's helpful to people. But the key there is he wants the church to be one. And he wants the Jewish Christians to be Jewish Christians, and that's great. He wants the Gentile Christians to be Gentile Christians, and that's great. He wants them to love each other, to worship together, right, to not judge each other. And so as he works through the Epistle, that's the main sort of direction that this is all aimed at.
So, the third lesson gets into the text of Romans. It's about Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1 is about sin in the world. It's about the fact that God's mercy towards sin will not go on forever. That repentance needs to happen. Uh, so Paul lists a lot of sins there. And so this is one of those places where this gets scaled to different age groups, right? Older teenagers, adults, you can get into sexual morality and that kind of thing because Saint Paul talks about it here. Younger groups, there's a lot of other things, right? Lying, stealing, hurting other people that you can get into, right? And in between, right? Um, but the, the sort of the core idea here, and that this is going to become more important later on too, in one of the later lessons in the Epistle, is how Saint Paul views sin as not just, "Oh, there's a list of rules that you grew up with, and since you broke one, now you must be punished." That's not how. That's how a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of our kids and our adults think about sin, is that it's this list of rules, right, that you're, you're not allowed to break. But the way St. Paul talks about sin is, is he very rarely uses sins plural. When he does, he's referring to specific actions. Mostly though, Saint Paul talks about sin in the singular, and he talks about it as this kind of force that's out in the world that we need to fight against, right? And that's, that's leading us to do bad things. And the reason we're going to get a little more into that later lesson, like I said, but the reason I bring it up now is this is, this is important conditioning how we talk to kids about sin in the world. Because there's one way of doing it, there's a horrible way of doing it, which is, "We here in the church are all good people, not like all those bad people out there who are doing all these horrible things, right? And don't be like them, or then you're not one of us anymore." If you want them all to leave, that's how to do it. I don't want to leave the church. There you go. Uh, it's the, his idea of sin is important here because whatever it is, the person who's doing it, whether they're inside the church or outside the church, is doing it because this power has come into their life. Again, so sin is something that takes control of us, that enslaves us, that makes us not free. And that turns this idea of a list of rules, "Oh, I have to follow this list of rules so I'm not free," to turn that on its head. I know we struggle against sin because sin is going to make you not free. Sin is what's going to be controlling. So Romans 1 talks about sin sort of out in the world, like I said. There's an important way to talk about that.
Fourth lesson in, uh, Romans 2 talks about sin in God's people. Because in chapter 1, Saint Paul's mainly talking to Gentiles, all the horrible stuff you used to do before, right, before Christ. Romans 2, he's talking to the Jewish Christians and say, "Yeah, you guys have the Torah. That's great. That's an incredible blessing from God. Did you keep it? Pretty much?" And they all have to kind of go, "Well, you know, no." And Saint Paul points out, this is all through the New Testament. We don't emphasize that much, but it's not the hearers of the law, but the the doers who are justified. And this, this gives a place to talk about, especially with older kids, hypocrisy in the church, because they see it. They're my parents to see for me, right? So, and talking about, uh, the fact that yes, that's a struggle for everybody. There are worse things to be than a hypocrite, because if you're a hypocrite, at least you have a standard, and it's high enough that you can't live up to it. Um, and so that, that again, the church is not the collection of the perfect people who do everything. It's the collection of the people struggling to try to get it right, to try to do what we know is, is that's right. And that then flows into, uh, chapters 3 and 4 in the fifth lesson, which, uh, the title on that is "Justification by Faithfulness." You may notice that's probably about how you're used to hearing it. You're probably used to hearing "Justification by Faith." And so two key concepts here are explaining what justification means and explaining faithfulness, because we kind of have bad ideas about them. So if your, your folks and the kids have any idea what justification means, that a lot of them may not. But if they have any idea, it's probably one they've gotten from some Protestants or somewhere where they think it's this legal thing, like you're on trial for your sins, and, and God's going to get you for it, and all that. So, uh, for, for older kids at least, there's a, there's a really easy explanation of what justification actually means. And that's the other way we use that word. That's when you're, you're doing word processing, yeah, right? Justification left, justification, full justification, right? What does that mean? Well, if it's left justified, it means it's lined up on the left-hand side, right? Just in case you're right-hand side. Full justification, it's lined up on both sides. And this is what justification means. Justice in the Bible is when everything is in its proper place, in its proper order and harmony, working properly. And injustice is when that order gets broken. So, justification is when things get put right. That's what I'm saying. Paul talks about justification, he's talking about how do we get straightened out? How do we get put right out of the parts of us that are broken and messed up and hurt? How did, how does God repair those and heal those and put them back in order? And the way Saint Paul is going to say in, in chapters 3 and 4, especially in Romans, is by faithfulness. I know you're steering by faith, and faith has been bringing to about the word has been devalued. So the same Greek word, *pistis*, gets translated as "believe," "belief," "faith" in different places, right? And the way people tend to think about it in our culture is believing means, "Oh, I say in my head that that is true." Right? Like religion is a true-false task, and you put the T's and the F's in the right place, and that makes you a Christian. And if you put them in a different place, that would make you Jewish or that would make, right? Um, and it's all what you believe in your head. Now, we already saw Saint Paul says, you know, just, just knowing the truth isn't really that good if you don't do anything about it, chapter 2. Right? And, and so faithfulness, which is more what *pistis* actually means, faithfulness and loyalty, right? Like allegiance is the idea that's behind faith. And the example Saint Paul uses in these chapters is Abraham. God comes to Abraham and says, "I'm going to give you this land on the other side of the known world. Pick up, take all your stuff, take your whole family and go there." And Abraham doesn't sit there and go, "Yeah, I believe you're true." Right? He has to get up, right, and gather up. No small project, right? Travel for years in a caravan, right? And then you get the quote that Saint Paul quotes, "Abraham is faithful, and God credited to him as righteousness," after he does that. After he does that. And so faithfulness is the way that we get put back together, living faithful, remaining faithful to Christ, despite those broken places, those damaged places, those hurt places, we remain faithful. And for adults, and probably even for older kids, we use the word faithful all the time in terms of marriage and relationships, right? And what does faithfulness mean in a marriage? It means that I still remain faithful to this person and still love her even when I don't really feel like it, even when I'm angry, even when I'm depressed, even when she's done something that irritates me, even when she hasn't done something I wanted her to, even when it's inconvenient. But I still love her and remain faithful. And so when we talk about faithfulness to God, or faithfulness of Christ, we're being the same thing. Even when we don't understand, even when we're confused, even when it's hard, even when it's difficult, we still remain faithful. And that involves not just thinking things, but doing things, just like it does in a, in a marriage. And younger kids, you could probably use friendship. The same guy today, you still, you're still friends. You had a fight, but you're still friends. So you're going to, you're going to make up.
Um, I'll try and pick up. I think I'm taking too long. Uh, so the sixth lesson is on Romans 5 and 6. And this, this contrast that that Christ makes between, we humans as being dead in Adam and being made alive in Christ. Because of Adam in Paradise, eating from the tree, we've all become mortal, we've all become subject to death. But in Christ, through our baptism, we participate in this resurrection and have new life. But Saint Paul's going to take this metaphor further and talk about the old man and the new man. And this is in our baptismal service, right? And that's important, referring to Adam and Christ, but it's also referring to us. And this is a very powerful thing to a lot of people, the idea that the person you used to be can die, and you can become a new person. That that's what Christ offers us. That you're like allowed to break character. I don't have to be the same person tomorrow that I am today. None of the things I don't like about me today have to be true. And divine, this is a basic part of our Christian life for Saint Paul, is daily trying to put off, right, that old person and welcome and bring it to being that new person who Christ has created us to be.
Seventh lesson, particularly, is it's Romans chapter 7 and 8, but particularly the end of chapter 7. We hear chapter 7 is tricky. I know it's a weird stuff. So we didn't go into that too much. You can listen to the episodes of the whole podcast. Fascinated by it. But for the sake of all ages, the end of Romans 7 is where Saint Paul talks about the good I want to do, I don't do. Right? And these other things that I don't want to do, I keep doing. And this is where he's describing our struggle with sin. Against sin is this force. When he calls this law and working as members, right? This thing that's going on in us, it's kind of mysterious. You know, I know what I should do and I really want to do it, but I keep not doing it. And I know I need to stop doing these other things, but I keep doing them. And, and this is, I think this is so universal as a human experience, right? That even at a kid, a relatively small kid, can say, you know, I love my mom and my dad and I want to make them happy, but I keep messing up, you know? I keep doing things that make them mad. I keep, you know, they can be at a very early age, you can kind of identify with that, right? You could, you could understand that strongly, right? And Saint Paul is not only describing that to us, which should make all of us feel good, because if Saint Paul of all people has faced this struggle his whole life, us facing it means there's still hope for us, yeah, right? That this is, this is the normal way of the Christian life. But he also promises victory at the end of that, right? That eventually Christ is going to set us free from that struggle that we face.
Lesson then is, uh, from the last part of Romans 8 and then through, uh, chapter 11. And what Saint Paul is really talking about there, ultimately, is talking about the church in all ages. It's the family of God, one household, one family, one family that includes the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians. It's not two families, but there's one family that includes both. And yes, there are some people who are sort of born into that family, that have certain duties and responsibilities because of that, right, to live up to that. There are other people who have been adopted into that faith. But everybody has received and received in this one household. And in that family, Christ is the firstborn son. So Saint Paul says he's the heir of everything. And it's through our relationship with him and our love for him that we receive the blessings of God, that our inheritance. And so this is where, uh, well, but that's sort of the main overarching thing. I know this includes Romans 9 through 11. Some of you adults here may be wondering, our main response to Calvinists on that, if you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, don't worry about it. It is, that's not what Romans 9 through 11 is about. This family, right? So like in Romans 9, Saint Paul talks about how, you know, Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, right? But Isaac was the one through whom the Messiah was going to come. And Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau, okay? But it was Jacob, right? And he draws that down to Christ, right? So it's like, yeah, there are lots of children of Abraham biologically, but Christ is the one, right, who has this firstborn status, who we need to be. And so Esau received part of the inheritance of Abraham because he was in a good relationship with Jacob, and that ended when his descendants worked anymore. And Ishmael, because of his relationship with Isaac. But I won't go too much further down.
So, the ninth lesson is on Romans 12-14. And sort of a core theme there is about living a life of peace. This was very much at odds with the Roman view, right? Now, you may say, well, the Romans loved peace, Pax Romana, the Roman peace, right? As Livy said at the time, they created a wasteland, they called it peace, right? So like, we just obliterate a city, yeah, it's very peaceful afterwards, right? Like in the rubble. But, but the Roman value was victory. They literally worshiped it, right? Victory, win. And this is another touchstone, I think, with our contemporary culture, the way we think about conflicts. It doesn't matter if it's a political conflict, it doesn't matter if it's a war somewhere in the world, it doesn't matter if it's an argument between me and my friend. There's somebody who's a good guy and somebody who's a bad guy. What needs to happen is that the good guy needs to fight and beat the bad guy, and then things will be right. Once the good guy has won, destroyed the bad guy, that's very Roman and not very Christian. And so what Saint Paul is really happening here, and this is, I mean, this is supposed to be beyond Saint Paul, but the goal is peace. The goal is not that I go and defeat my enemy, it's that I go and make my enemy my friend, and now there's peace between us, this reconciliation. And he talks about this at all levels, because part of this is his repudiation of his Zealotry, of him having been a member of that Zealot group, where he says, "We need to live at peace with the civil authorities." And for a big chunk of Saint Paul's ministry, Caligula was the Roman Emperor. So kind of process that, right? We complain about stuff the presidents of the United States do. We haven't had a legit Caligula, right? Nobody's made their horses senator, right? Nobody's, right? So yeah, right. But what does Saint Paul do? He says, "We pray for the emperor." He says, "I want to try and get in front of the emperor so I can preach the gospel to him." And everything, but sin, we need to be obedient to the governing authority. It's not because they're good, you knew they weren't good, right? But violence, he saw, wasn't the answer to that kind of a violent conflict. Was not the answer to that. It was repudiating that for this openness. And so this is something all of us as Christians who are living in our modern super ultra-competitive society to learn. Because this even gets into our churches, whether it's a dispute in our churches, who's right and who's wrong, and whoever's wrong needs to get people. Not, we need to find a way to all reconcile with each other, see if you work together, right? And we live at peace with each other, even if we disagree about certain things, etc., etc. And so this is a very counter-cultural lesson, right, to try and teach, um, in our world today, at least in the U.S. I don't know if there's any Canadians here. From what I hear of Canadian politics, it's not an event.
And then finally, the 10th lesson, which is Romans chapter 15 and 16, the last two chapters, um, where we find out who wrote it, that name Tertius. The, uh, the focus there is, and this is something we tend to skim over at the end of Saint Paul's letters. And one of the things that should really tell us, maybe we shouldn't skim over these endings quite so quickly, is that we actually have an Epistle written, appointed for Sunday services, that are just like the last chapter of one of Saint Paul's Epistles, where he's listing all these people. You know, "Say hi to so-and-so, say hi to that guy, oh, I left this guy's cloak, can you get it back?" Like, you're like, "Why is this this Sunday of history?" Right? But part of what this shows us, I bring it full circle now, right? These are actual humans, right? Just like us. We're going and celebrating the Eucharist together on the Lord's Day. In Rome, it was a long time ago, but there were humans like us in a place where you can still go doing what we do, right? And Saint Paul knew some of these people, and some of them he didn't know, right? And they had their individual concerns, right? And their individual struggles. And, and Saint Paul, right, as a good pastor, cares about them. There's a bigger thing here. This is in the Bible. So, "Revive somebody that he let him his cloak is in the scriptures. It is inspired by God for our salvation," which tells us God cared about all those people who we know nothing about in most cases, other than their name as Saint Paul mentioned it. Some of them show up in big lists in the Synaxarion, like when they get to the 70, it's like, "Well, who are the 70?" And it's like, "Well, every name we have in the New Testament, right, off the road." But we don't know much about it. But God knows their name, and he cares about them. And their problems were important enough that this portion of scripture got addressed. And that means that what Saint Paul has to say here is for us too. We're not sort of the also-rans and Johnny-come-latelys who happen to find this thing. You know, maybe we can figure something out that might be helpful to us. Like, no, this is, this is for us too, because God cares about my individual struggle with sin. He cares about the conflicts I'm facing, and then I find a way to make peace, etc., etc. So that's the overview. I probably took more time than I was supposed to. I'm sorry.