Does prayer change things? Or us? Or both?

While I’m not particularly good at remembering the names of people I meet for the first time, I know how important their names are. I convey that I care about someone when on seeing him or her again I can offer more than a vague, generic greeting. With a name, I demonstrate that I see persons as particular individuals with a story that has made them who they are, a family that has cared to give them a way to be identified.

I wish, for that reason, that I did better at names. Usually with some embarrassment I have to ask a person that I’ve met before to tell me again (even yet again) what they go by, how they are named.

I have long known that names matter when I turn to God. I forget here, too the profound names I can employ.

What I call God, how I name God, has much to do with my experience of prayer—and my experience of life.

For we forget that God is not the "ultimate vagueness," as Stanley Hauerwas wryly put it. Or is God merely a force? Or is God, as eminent scientist Stephen Hawking put it in an interview in Time, simply "the name people give to the reason we are here"? (He went on to say that for him, "that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom we can have a personal relationship.")

This season of year, coming fresh as I am from Christmas morning, helps me remember. (In a liturgical tradition like mine, today is still sits very much within the season of Christmas.) This time of year helps me not take for granted the names I have been invited to use for God.

Emmanuel, for instance. That name cropped up twice in the appointed Scripture readings a couple of Sundays ago. First it was found in Isaiah, where the prophet tells a king that a son born royally to him would be a sign. Immanuel, Isaiah 7 explains, the name for the special child that would point to God’s ongoing presence during tumult, literally means "God is with us."

I like that name for God. I like remembering how God goes alongside me as I glide (or sometimes bumpily ride) through each day. Matthew in the New Testament liked it too, picking up that name and applying it freely to Jesus, saying this special child would communicate, too, by his name. By coming into Mary and Joseph’s soon-to-be-set-up household, God, embodied in Jesus, says I’m moving into the neighborhood. God with us, with me. God among us.

But I also like the name Matthew goes on to report was to be given to Jesus. It’s curious that that name Emmanuel (Matthew’s preferred spelling) gets mentioned, but then overshadowed.

For the angel tells Joseph that he would name the child Jesus. That name means even more: not only God with us, but God for us. For it is, in a more ancient language, Yeshua, Yahweh-Savior.

Remembering that name, I glimpse how God comes not only to be with us, but also to help me. Not only someone who comes alongside, but who draws near to rescue.

There’s a lot in a name, especially one that tells me that God promises not only to show up, but to come looking for us, reaching out for us.

God will have more in store for humankind than a birth, than an incarnation. He will also take on a self-sacrificial life.

For God’s deity, as the theologian Karl Barth wrote, "is … no prison in which he can exist only in and for Himself." No, Barth says, God decides freely, for all his glory, to become something else. In his very nature as God has an odd kind of freedom for one so immensely and infinitely great: We see instead "his freedom to be in and for Himself but also with us and for us, to assert but also to sacrifice himself."

He arrives on the scene (even in the scenes of our daily lives), not just to wait in the wings "out there." He is born to make everything different, not just in some grand scheme, but in our lives. Because of his powerful names, I can even believe, if I remember, that he comes to me, and cares for me.