The Goose was Cooked - Jan Hus

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is October 27th, 2020 and we are continuing our study of Reformation week.
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We are building up to October 31st.
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October 31st is a day that many people celebrate as Halloween, but those of us in the Protestant community and particularly the Reformed community look at October 31st a little bit differently.
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We know that that was the day that Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door of the castle church at Wittenberg, Germany and it ultimately sparked the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation.
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Therefore every year on October 31st we celebrate Reformation Day.
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And what I'm doing this week on the program, and I know this program is a daily conversation about scripture, culture, and media.
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This week though it's going to be a conversation about history.
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I'm going to be giving daily history lessons on the Reformation and today I'm going to be talking about one of the men who was known as a pre-reformer.
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I began yesterday by talking about John Wycliffe.
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John Wycliffe lived in the 1300s.
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He lived about 150 years before Martin Luther and John Wycliffe was very important for doing many things, not the least of which he was the first to translate the Bible into English.
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And John Wycliffe was very influential on another man and that man is going to be the subject of our lesson today.
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His name was Jan Hus.
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I have a question to ask as I begin this lesson.
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Have you ever heard the phrase, your goose is cooked? Well that particular phrase is actually based on an event that happened in the life of the man that we're going to talk about today.
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John Hus was born in 1373 in the southern part of Bohemia, which is now known as Czechoslovakia, in the village of Husanek.
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And that was why he was called John Hus or John Hus.
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And the name Hus means goose, a word which Hus often used in referring to himself.
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He would call himself the goose.
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And so what we're going to find out later about him is that because of the issues that he took with the church and because of the issues that he raised, he was actually martyred for his faith.
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He was, in fact, burned.
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So when you hear the phrase, your goose is cooked, understand that that is in reference to the burning of Jan Hus.
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So let us look at the life of Jan Hus.
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What can we, what do we learn about this particular reformer? Jan Hus was the rector and preacher at the Church of the Holy Infants of Bethlehem in Prague, and he had been heavily influenced by the teachings of John Wycliffe.
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And it led him to become more and more desirous to see reformation in the church.
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Prague was also a center for early reformed thinking.
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The chapel where Hus was appointed was raised in 1391 by a rich merchant to be a center for reformed teaching.
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So this is something that was going on around him.
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And because of his preaching, Prague was put under an interdict of the church.
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And this is an important historical moment, because when Prague was put under interdict because of the preaching of Jan Hus, this put immense pressure on Hus to stop what he was doing.
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Because an interdict essentially meant that the church was no longer able to do the things that the church needed to do in the community.
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The church could no longer perform any services under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
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That would include no weddings, no last rites, and no participation in the mass.
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And all of those things were necessary, as believed by Roman Catholics, for the participation in grace.
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You could not experience grace outside of the sacraments of the church.
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So no weddings, no last rites, no mass.
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These are all sacraments.
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And therefore, when Prague was put under interdict, no religious services could be held, and therefore Hus was urged by the people to leave.
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And he pleaded with them.
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He said, we don't need that.
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We can go straight to God.
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But they felt as if they needed the church, and they needed to be lifted, the interdict to be lifted.
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So they demanded for him to leave.
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Through a series of events, he was finally forced to go to the Council of Constance in 1414.
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Now, if you listened to the program yesterday, you may remember that I mentioned the Council of Constance.
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The Council of Constance condemned John Wycliffe, but John Wycliffe had been long dead.
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So they went, and they dug up his bones, they burned his bones, and they poured his bones into the River Swift.
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The Council of Constance was not messing around.
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They were out to find and destroy this early Reformed influence.
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And so they chose to destroy the bones of John Wycliffe with the hope that that would destroy his memory.
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But as we saw yesterday, it certainly has not.
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Well, they brought Jan Hus to the Council as well, to the Council of Constance.
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And he came because he was promised something called safe conduct by the Emperor Sigismund.
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And basically, safe conduct means that you come, and you can state your case, and you're under the protection of this person, this particular leader.
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You're under his protection, and so you don't have to worry about being burned at the stake because you're under the protection of the Emperor.
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However, once he stated his case, and once he was condemned as a heretic, the leaders of the Council convinced Emperor Sigismund to lift the protection that he had given to Hus and essentially to give up the safe conduct that he had been provided.
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And they said that you don't give safe conduct to heretics, Emperor.
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And the Emperor, of course, was concerned.
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He had to protect himself because if you side with a heretic, you are a heretic too.
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And so the leaders demanded that the heretic, Jan Hus, was not worthy of safe conduct, and they pushed for his execution.
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And so Jan Hus was taken out, and even though he had been promised safe conduct by the Emperor, he was taken out, and he was burned for his preaching, and ultimately burned for his faith in Jesus Christ.
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This again is where the phrase, your goose is cooked, comes from.
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It's actually making a reference to the burning of Jan Hus.
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And it was by fire, again, that he was executed.
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But here's an interesting prologue to his life.
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He died singing, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.
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Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.
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That was the last words in song of Jan Hus.
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Later, Martin Luther would be accused of being a Hussite, and the reason why is because Luther's teachings were so similar to those of Hus in regard to the church, in regard to grace and faith, and in regard to justification and salvation.
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I want to take a moment and comment on the burning of Jan Hus, because we live in a time where we can't even imagine what it would be like to see someone burned alive for their faith.
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And yet, this was something that was not uncommon during this particular time in history.
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The church saw itself as protecting the people from heretics by having the heretics killed, and killed in such a heinous way that it would strike fear into the hearts of anyone else who would seek to bring heresy into the church.
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But these persecutions, what became known as papal persecutions, were far spread and varied.
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They were all over.
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And I want to read to you from the Fox's Book of Martyrs.
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This is a book that was written about the historical martyrs of the Christian church, and in chapter 4 of Fox's Book of Martyrs, it is entitled, Papal Persecutions.
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And it begins with these words, Thus far our history of persecution has been confined principally to the pagan world.
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We come now to a period when persecution under the guise of Christianity committed more enormities than ever disgraced the annals of paganism.
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Disregarding the maxims and the spirit of the gospel, the papal church, arming herself with the power of the sword, vexed the church of God and wasted it for several centuries, a period most appropriately termed in history, the Dark Ages.
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It goes on to say, On the death of Leo X in 1521, Adrian, the Inquisitor General, was elected Pope.
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He had laid the foundation of his papal celebrity in Spain.
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It appears, according to the most moderate calculation, that during the five years of the ministry of Adrian, 24,025 persons were condemned by the Inquisition, of whom 1,620 were burned alive.
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Among those burned was Jan Hus.
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Jan Hus was burned because he had the willingness to stand against the church, but not against scripture and not against truth, but against a church which had twisted the scripture and rejected the truth.
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Jan Hus did not stand against Jesus.
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He stood against the Roman Catholic Church, and I believe he stood with Christ.
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I believe he stood for Christ, and therefore I am thankful to tell his story today and to remind you that he died singing to his Lord, and I believe, by God's grace, he entered into the presence of his Lord that day.
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Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.
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What a wonderful thing to be able to sing even in the midst of the flames of persecution.
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This has been a short retelling of the story of Jan Hus.
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I hope it's been an encouragement to you, and I hope you join us again tomorrow as we continue these daily examinations of some of the men and women who were influential in the Protestant Reformation.
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Thank you again for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey, and I have been your Calvinist.
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May God bless you.
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Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to him in repentance and faith will find him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through him.
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May God be with you.