This past week, when a lot of the world was fixated on Sarah Palin’s daughter, and the problem of teen pregnancy, there was news about one baby that didn’t get much attention.

It should have.

The AP reported the story of a little baby named Solomon, an Ethiopian child who was left by his mother at an orphanage there when he was just one year old. The only things his mother left with him were a crucifix and a picture of Jesus. It was, in effect, a death sentence. Because little Solomon had HIV. He was one of about 14-thousand Ethiopian babies born with the virus every year. The health care system has to struggle to care for these infants, with limited resources.

But during a visit to Ethiopia, a Wyoming mother named Erin Henderson saw Solomon, and fell in love. She decided to adopt him on the spot. Officials told her they weren’t sure he’d even live through the weekend. But he did. And Erin Henderson brought him home to Wyoming.

Today, Solomon Henderson is a two-year old receiving the greatest medical care in the world. Incredibly, Erin and her husband now have 11 children – two of them adopted from Ethiopia with HIV.

The AP said they are part of a growing trend of Americans who are seeking out children with HIV from other countries, to adopt, and bring here, and care for them, and love them.

Another mother with an HIV baby said she has learned from her little girl how to be patient, and kind. And she explained: “I am not going to tell her that there is not one part of her that is not beautiful and wonderful and pure.”

I don’t think you could find a meaningful example of St. Paul’s words to the Romans;

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

It is, he says, the great summing up of the commandments – the central teaching from which all others flow. “Love,” he writes, “is the fulfillment of the law.”

We’re accustomed these days to thinking of love as a feeling, an emotion, an impulse. It’s for greeting cards and songs you hear in elevators. But the kind of love Paul is talking about, the kind of love that characterizes Christianity, is greater and deeper and wider than that.

Love, in its most profound and meaningful sense, is a choice. A choice to give to another just as much as you would give to yourself. A choice to surrender a part of yourself for someone who needs more.

A choice to take into your arms a dying stranger, a baby, and will it – LOVE it – to new life.

The pagans used to remark: “See how these Christians love one another.” It was said with awe and envy. And it wasn’t because they saw them strolling through Rome holding hands like Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. It’s because they saw them caring for people dying of the plague – even non-believers. People who were abandoned by their own were taken in and nursed by the followers of Jesus. When no one else would care for them, the Christians would. And that is one reason, among many, why the faith grew and spread. It was because of love. Sacrificial, self-giving love.

The kind of love that led Christ to the cross.

The kind of love that led the rich son of an Italian merchant to live in rags and preach the joy of poverty.

That kind of love led countless missionaries across oceans and deserts and jungles – into cities and across continents, to risk their lives.

It led an Albanian nun to the gutters of Calcutta, where she rolled up her sleeves and washed the sores of lepers.

This past Friday was the feast day of that nun, Blessed Mother Teresa. When people would show up at her convent in India, wanting to volunteer, she would tell them instead, “Find your own Calcutta.” The fact is: Calcutta is here. It is Forest Hills. It is Long Island. It is in an air-conditioned office with a cubicle. Calcutta may even be found in your own living room. It is anyplace people are in need, desperate for encouragement, or comfort, or hope.

Mother Teresa knew that. “There is a terrible hunger for love,” she said. “We all experience that in our lives – the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family. Find them. Love them.”

But it’s not the sort of love that belongs just to saints. It belongs to all of us, if we choose it. For, as I said, love is a choice. The choice to give, or to take. To care, or to be careless. To look, instead of just see. To listen, instead of just hear. That is the kind of love that Paul spoke of. That kind of love does more than just “fulfill the law.” It also never loses sight of Christ – his closeness, his immediacy, his presence at work in our lives. As Jesus told his disciples in today’s gospel: “Where two or more are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

How often do we remember that? How often, as we journey into our own Calcuttas, do we even realize it?

Remember what the pagans said of the ancient Christians: “See how they love one another.”

This morning, as we prepare to receive Christ himself in the Eucharist, it’s worth asking ourselves:

Would anyone be able to say that of us?