Robin Williams, we miss you, buddy.

This man that brought so much joy into our life through the medium of laughter, I am embarrassed to admit I never saw Jumanji until this last summer with my children for the first time.

Oh my gosh.

You know, he's on all of our minds again because of there's a new documentary from HBO about his life and I just can't help but think of him as an archetype for our cultural moment.

Behind that smile and he had such a great smile, there was a deep well of sadness.

And whether it's a Robin Williams or the suicide of an Anthony Bourdain or a music video like this is America about the dark underbelly of the entertainment industry and particularly the experience of the black community in our country,

or just the stats on anti-depressants which are through the roof up something like 65% and not that many years, multi-billion dollar industry, even in our city, which this time of year, I mean our city is just the overlap of heaven on earth.

But it's just about three months that it's like that.

The rest of the year we rank year after year as the most depressed city in the entire country, right?

Whatever it is behind the smile, the singing, the dancing, the noise, the comedic tone of our nation is a deep well of sadness.

For a nation built around the pursuit of light liberty and the pursuit of happiness, man, it feels like chasing after the wind.

And even in the church, behind that smile, hi, how are you great singing? Clap, clap, clap.

For a lot of people, we live with a low grade anxiety and chronic depression that just we acclimate to as the new normal.

And a lot of people think that Jesus has little or nothing to say on the subject of happiness.

A lot of us imagine Jesus kind of like the Catholic painting from the Sistine Chapel, right?

He's just pale white, never mind that he was a Jew who grew up in Africa.

He's bone fin, never mind that he was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard, and above all, and picture after picture, he is sad.

Never mind that there's a prophecy about the coming Messiah from Isaiah that said he would be, quote, anointed with the oil of joy more than all of his companions.

My want to be Eugene Peterson translation of the Hebrew is he would be the happiest person alive.

And did you know that quote, that prophecy is quoted by the writers in the New Testament multiple times.

People that knew Jesus firsthand so many of them said the same thing. He was. He was the happiest person alive.

Yet most of us would not think to look to Jesus for advice on how to live a happy life.

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