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b'People often call for the separation of state and religion, but in reality, we tread in the middle especially for LGBTQ+ Christians, every day. The scripture today calls for us to strengthen our faith while fighting for those who are oppressed. It calls for us to question the system and the politics that continue to undervalue those who are having trouble supporting themselves.\\nEpisode TranscriptBrian: Welcome to the Queer Theology podcast!\\nFr. Shay: Where each episode, we take a queer look at the week\\u2019s lectionary readings. We\\u2019re the co-founders of QueerTheology.com and the hosts for this podcast. I\\u2019m Father Shay Kearns\\xa0\\nB: And I\\u2019m Brian G. Murphy.\\nFS: Hello, hello, and welcome to the QueerTheology podcast. It\\u2019s Sunday, July 21st and this week we are going to take a look at Amos 1-12, I\\u2019m gonna go ahead and read it for us. It will also be on the show notes, you can access those at QueerTheology.com/286, but again, Amos 1-12.\\nB: And that\\u2019s Amos 8:1-12\\nFS: Yes, thank you.\\nThis is what the Lord God showed me: a basket of summer fruit. He said, \\u201cAmos, what do you see?\\u201d\\nI said, \\u201cA basket of summer fruit.\\u201d\\nThen the Lord said to me,\\n\\u201cThe end has come upon my people Israel;\\nI will never again forgive them.\\nOn that day, the people will wail the temple songs,\\u201d\\nsays the Lord God;\\n\\u201cthere will be many corpses,\\nthrown about everywhere.\\nSilence.\\u201d\\nJudgment on oppressors and hypocrites\\nHear this, you who trample on the needy and destroy\\nthe poor of the land, 5 saying,\\n\\u201cWhen will the new moon\\nbe over so that we may sell grain,\\nand the Sabbath\\nso that we may offer wheat for sale,\\nmake the ephah smaller, enlarge the shekel,\\nand deceive with false balances,\\nin order to buy the needy for silver\\nand the helpless for sandals,\\nand sell garbage as grain?\\u201d\\nThe Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:\\nSurely I will never forget what they have done.\\nWill not the land tremble on this account,\\nand all who live in it mourn,\\nas it rises and overflows like the Nile,\\nand then falls again, like the River of Egypt?\\nOn that day, says the Lord God,\\nI will make the sun go down at noon,\\nand I will darken the earth in broad daylight.\\nI will turn your feasts into sad affairs\\nand all your singing into a funeral song;\\nI will make people wear mourning clothes\\nand shave their heads;\\nI will make it like the loss of an only child,\\nand the end of it like a bitter day.\\nThe days are surely coming, says the Lord God,\\nwhen I will send hunger and thirst on the land;\\nneither a hunger for bread, nor a thirst for water,\\nbut of hearing the Lord \\u2019s words.\\nThey will wander from sea to sea,\\nand from north to east;\\nthey will roam all around, seeking the Lord\\u2019s word,\\nbut they won\\u2019t find it.\\nYeah! What do we do with this?\\nB: So, I am obsessed with Amos. One of my favorite passages in the Bible of all time is in Amos. Amos 5:18-24 which I will put links to in the show notes for this episode which you can get at QueerTheology.com/286. But Amos is just like most, if not all of the Hebrew prophets, does not mince words and has some harsh things to say. What struck me about reading the text this time, I love this process of going through the lectionary and sort of revisiting text over and over again, and sort of uncover new meaning each time. This is actually the first time doing this passage on this podcast, but what struck at me this time while reading this passage that right here at the beginning it says: The Lord said to me, \\u201cThe end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again forgive them.\\u201d\\nIt\\u2019s kind of like fun to see an angsty God here, because we just know that that is not true, right? So either God is an unreliable person, thing, being that changes God\\u2019s mind or sort of makes empty threats. And/or, the people recording their accounts of the Bible run their experience of God through their own personal lens and narrative and experience and it shifts by the context at their end. And/or God really never is going to forgive us ever again. So, that is something that sticks out at m'