Staying in My Sandbox

I'm not a politician. I'm not a lawyer.  I'm not a constitutional scholar.  I'm not even a particularly politically active person.  I vote, I pay attention, but my introversion doesn't often lead me to march out into the streets and protest.  When I do go to political type events I tend to be quiet and listen to what people have to say. So I'm not going to comment on most of what happened at the RNC last night, other than to say that I found the xenophobic jingoism a bit difficult to watch without physically cringing.
What I am going to comment on is the only part of the whole mess about which I am qualified to critique: the closing prayer and benediction, because I do that sort of thing at places.  Also, because I am a follower of Jesus and as such a member of the Body of Christ.  In the interest of balance, I'm going to give you this link to a conservative blogger who is also commenting on the travesty of Mark Burns' little performance.  I fully agree with my "Red State" counterpart that this was not a prayer by any recognizable standard of Christian discipleship.  Many in the church may disagree with each other about the politics of the day.  I do not disqualify conservatives or Republicans from being honest followers of the Christ, but when you have something like this at your convention?
Look, one of the reasons I have trouble taking Libertarians seriously is because of the perpetual presence of people like Vermin Love Supreme, who is pretty obviously making some sort of satirical jest at the absurdity of politics. I would prefer a man with a boot on his head to what happened last night.  Burns was making no such jest, he was frightfully serious, when he invoked the name of Jesus Christ and then proceeded to co-opt that name into a hateful diatribe naming Hillary and the "Liberal Democratic Party" as the enemy.
He appears to pray that Trump will unite the party in the same breath as he is asking God to keep us "divided not united," although I suspect that is simply a product of horrendous grammar and poor sentence structure.  I think he either meant to switch that order, or he is blaming the "liberal democrats" for doing that, to tell you the truth, I'm just not sure.
Theologically I'm wondering how any follower of Christ can justify bearing this sort of witness in the public arena.  Even conservatives are choking on it, it echoes the worst religious fascism of the past, it claims divine blessing on one and only one political ideology, it absolutely blasphemes the very name of Christ, and I'm not using the word blasphemy lightly.  That sort of mean, nasty, divisive, hateful rhetoric "in the name of Jesus," is absolutely using the name of the Lord in vain.
That's the biggest problem, but my problems don't end there.  My other problem with the Right Reverend Burns is a professional one, and I don't mean theological.  He was asked to give a Benediction, from the Latin Benedictus, bene = good, dictus = word.  He was supposed to send out the gathered people with a good word, with a blessing, not with a curse.  What he did was demonic, in that it was a perversion of the intended purpose of what he was called upon to do.  He allowed his hate and his fear to rob that moment of the power it might have had, to soothe the angry souls, to claim the peace of God and to send the delegates and attendees about their business filled with grace.
I know, most of us don't pay any attention to the importance of liturgy in our lives.  For most of us prayers like this one are supposed to be pro-forma, but liturgy is from the Greek Leitourgia which translated woodenly means "The Work of the People." It is a code of rituals which are meant to move in concert with the divine Spirit of God.  A Benediction is meant to send transformed people out into the world to continue to follow Christ and bear witness to the presence of the Spirit.
So the blasphemy was not only to the "name of Jesus," which he said was so important in his introduction (a crucified man, who said love your enemies), but also to the Spirit of God which moves among the children of God. I'm sure Mr. Burns has read the Bible, so I'm not going to go about quoting things, but I would ask him and anyone gave him the Amen he was asking for, to go back and take a closer look, because I think you're missing something crucially important.