A full-page advertisement in the newspaper for women’s underwear was designed to catch the eye of the casual page-turner looking for the morning news, but my attention was not drawn to the model but to the words in the upper left-hand corner, “Now more perfect than ever.” That is the curse of having been an English major; mistakes jump off the page at us that others might overlook.

Nothing can be “more perfect.” There are no gradations of “perfect;” either something is perfect, or it is not. It can be “less than perfect,” or “more or less perfect,” but not “more perfect.”

My mind goes back to those assignments in high school English class, the ones we handed in that were three pages long and the teacher returned them five pages long because he had added two pages of corrections – in red pencil! It was as if the paper had been hemorrhaging, all of that red. When I read about Malachi’s refiner’s fire and purifying soap I think about the corrections teachers have made to my work, not because they enjoyed finding fault with me, pointing out how “less than perfect” I was, but because they cared enough to make me better. Their judgment was a sign of their devotion to my getting better at the task.

Love can express itself in judgment, says the scriptures, because the judgment opens us up to new self-understanding, and new self-understanding to a better life, never perfect, never, never more perfect, but maybe someday more or less perfect. We United Methodists are given to follow John Wesley’s sense that it actually is God grace that first judges us, that reveals to us how we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. When that sinks in, we can be open to being led by God to live a better life. God’s prevenient grace, the grace that comes before we even know God is at work in our lives.

Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story entitled “Revelation.” Ruby Turpin, a farmer along with her husband, Claud, go together to the doctor’s office in a small southern town. Ruby orders Claud to sit in a chair and pushes him down into it. He puts his foot on the coffee table, rolls up his pant leg, and shows all the others who fill the room his giant bruise from where the cow had kicked him.

Ruby looks around and judges everyone else in the room, first by looking at their shoes. The stylish woman with red and gray suede shoes that match her dress, the white-trashy woman in her bedroom slippers, the old woman in her tennis shoes, the ugly, overweight young woman who is reading a textbook called Human Development, wearing Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. Ruby is wearing her best black patent leather pumps.

As we listen to Ruby force conversation upon the people in the waiting room, and as O’Connor lets us know what goes through Ruby’s mind, we see that she is a self-righteous, haughty, smug racist. She has something cruel to say about everyone, and she says it.

After a steady stream of derogation, Ruby Turpin concludes for all to hear, “If it’s one thing I am, it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’” Remember the Pharisee praying in the temple, “Thank God I am not like other people!”? Well, here it is.

O’Connor’s next sentence: “The book struck her directly over the left eye.” The student, the ugly one in Ruby’s eyes whom, she learned in earlier conversation with her mother, went to Wellesley College “way up north,” “and it hasn’t done much for her manners,” Ruby concludes, that student has thrown the book at Ruby, hitting her just above her left eye with Human Development.

You know how we say that someone goes to court and stands before the judge, and the judge “throws the book” at the person – takes all the laws in the book and applies them to the person’s indiscretions. Well, here the young woman throws the book at Ruby Turpin and hits her in the head. It gets Ruby’s attention.

Judgment can do that to us, get our attention. Malachi says, “The messenger God is sending will be like a refiner’s fire and like a fuller’s soap.” He could have added, “like a book on human development hurled across the room.” It is meant to get our attention, to hit us along side the head so that we say, “Oh, now I see!”

Malachi predicts it and then John the Baptist fulfils the prediction when he comes as one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord!” It is a wake-up call to be baptized, to be purified in the river water of repentance, so that we might be open to the promptings of the Lord.

Oh, and the name of the young person who throws the book in O’Connor’s story? Mary Grace. It is Grace who throws the book at Ruby. Grace, prevenient grace throws the book at us, judges us, not out of exasperation as in O’Connor’s short story, but out of love in the scripture. In God’s story it is love that leads to judgment. Like the English teacher with the red pencil, God judges us with a strictness so that we might become better human beings. Not perfect, mind you, and never more than perfect, but “going on to perfection,” as John Wesley was fond of saying. Developing in the faith, “maturing” as Paul wrote in his epistles.

As the book throwing young woman is sedated and taken off to the hospital in an ambulance, and as Claud limps out of the office to drive their pick-up truck back to the farm, Ruby remembers what the attacker had called her, “A warthog from hell.” She does not tell her husband that, but it burns deeply into her mind. When Claud drives the hired help back into town, Ruby hoses down the pigs in the sty and yells at God, “Why me? There were a lot of trashy people in that waiting room, but you gave that message just to me. How am I worse than they are? I give to them, black or white. I’m a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. How am I a hog? How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell, too?” She yells at God, “Who do you think you are?”

Being loved and judged at the same time, that is a hard concept to accept. I have a colleague in ministry who works with young adults who have addictions – mainly drugs and alcohol. His residents struggle to make sense of their situation in the treatment center. Many of them deny that they really have a problem, and Bill tells them the cold, hard truth that they do. He is like the refiner’s fire, the purifying soap that insists, “Clean up your act!” It is a message that can come sounding like judgment, but it is a judgment that emanates from love. Because he loves them, he tells them the truth, even when they resist and shout back, “Who do you think you are?”

God’s love for us is so certain and secure that God can risk telling us the truth so that we can make changes in our lives. It is not a judgment that insists we straighten up in order to be loved by God, but rather it is a love that shows us how to straighten up so that we might live lives fitting of God’s beloved. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

As if Ruby being told that she is a “warthog from hell” was not enough of a revelation, she has another one. She still stands at the fence of the pig pen, hose in hand, but now the pigs all have gathered around the old sow who grunts softly. O’Connor writes, “A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.” As the sun set there was only “a purple streak in the sky cutting through a field of crimson . . .” And then what Ruby sees is that streak of light becoming “a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of fire.” And on it is a vast horde of souls rumbling toward heaven.

Like Jacob’s Ladder, now Ruby’s revelation. This is how O’Connor describes it: “There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of (blacks) in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.” The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

Ruby looks even closer. The people like her, the last ones in line, “were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. . . . .Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Dignity, orderliness, common sense, and respectable behavior . . . that is not enough. Even our virtues will be purified by God’s judgment so that we might be more closely perfect . . . less respectable and more closely perfect.

Advent is a tough time of year for Christians who take their faith seriously. It calls for us to submit ourselves to God’s judgment, knowing that even those attributes of which we are most proud will be melted down, refined, purified. Most of us do not subject ourselves to such scrutiny freely. Someone has to throw the book at us to get our attention – Mary Grace of the story, prevenient grace of the scriptures.

Can we see what Ruby Turpin did not understand, that God’s love leads to judgment and that judgment insists that we live more in accord with God’s will? God’s will – that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. God’s will – that we love our neighbors as ourselves. God’s will – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. God’s will – that we forgive others as we have been forgiven by God. God’s will – that we be humble, comforting, merciful, pure in heart, makers of peace, what Jesus preaches at the “blessed life.”

Grace throws the book at us, and it convicts us of the work yet to do. Now what? Now what is our response? Amen.