The Colors of Martyrdom

There's an old sermon from 7th Century Ireland called the Cambrai Homily.  It lays out an elaborate theology of Christian Martyrdom using Matthew 16:24 as a starting point ("Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me').  The Cambrai Homily famously categorizes martyrdom according to three colours:  red, white and green (though the actual hue of the third color is disputed; in Irish it's glas). 

"Red martyrs" are perhaps the most obvious.  They faced violent persecution, torture or death for the sake of Christ.  Red martyrs bled for Jesus. 

Such martyrdoms, of course, were both common and precious in the earliest days of the church (witness the horrors described so vividly in the Book of Revelation), but as Christianity became increasingly mainstream in the Roman Empire, bona fide martyrdoms got less and less easy to obtain.  On at least one occasion, a group of Christians actually turned themselves in to the Roman authorities, asking to be executed for Christ's sake (and creating no small amount of bewilderment for the Roman governor, who, if not sympathetic towards Christians, was at least indifferent, and certainly not hostile). 

So the church needed new ways for the faithful to express their death-defying commitment to Christ.  This they found in the concept of a "white martyrdom."  A white martyr did not shed literal blood for Jesus, but expressed his or her witness through some life-long vow of asceticism or other--a bloodless "death to the world" that might include things like: vows of chastity, monastic oaths, mendicancy, or becoming a hermit.  These are "white deaths" in lieu of the red.

Now this was old news by the 7th Century, but what the Cambrai Homily adds is the third color: a "green" (glas) martyrdom.  Green Martyrdom was about self-mortification and denying desire.  Fasting was a predominant form of "green martyrdom."  So were penitential acts like praying in the frigid Atlantic or spending the night immersed in water (this seems to be a common one).  A Green Martyr died to the immediate needs of the flesh, in order to turn the heart to God instead.

I've been thinking about the Cambrai's color scheme for martyrdom ever since I preached this sermon on the Martyrdom of Stephen, back in August.   You see:  I live in a world where desire is often seen as the driving mechanism of life: consumer desire drives our economy, emotional desire drives our entertainment industry, and, according one author at least, sexual desire drives the Internet (see Patchen Barss's book, The Erotic Engine). 

The point is: in a world where life is so closely associated with fulfilled desire, self-denial really does have the odor of death about it.  So I'm wondering today how radical a witness for Jesus we might have if we updated the tradition of the Green Martyr. 

What if we consciously saw denying those desires that no one in our culture thinks you can live without, as a stand-in for the honor of dying for Christ?