Hunger Games - Standing Up For What Is Right Series

Audience

Junior High/ Middle School, High School, Young Adult

Topics

Convictions, Standing up for what’s right

Key Scripture

Daniel 3

The Point

You must have the courage to stand up for what is right

Materials

Youtube video, Pool Noodles

Components

Message

Preparation

Download Hunger Games trailer 2 from youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dSyTkxfjCeU

(I use www.zamzar.com)

Ideas for the Sermon

Play your own version of The Hunger Games. To play this game you will need a pool noodle, large open area, at least six students and pieces of 10-inch cardboard or round plastic bases for each player. Select one student to be the candidate and give him the pool noodle. Put a cardboard or plastic base on the ground and ask him to stand on it. Ask the other students to form a circle around him, standing approximately 10 to 15 feet away from him. Give each of them a cardboard or plastic base and ask them to stand on it.

The candidate tries to touch (not hit) the other boys’ head or feet with the pool noodle. However, he and the other players cannot move from their base at any time during the game. The players can avoid the pool noodle by jumping or ducking at the appropriate time. Any boy touched by the pool noodle is eliminated from the game. Play continues until just one boy remains. That boy becomes the winner.

In this message we will be looking at lessons from the hottest thing going right now, The Hunger Games. Let’s start out by watching the trailer to this awesome movie.

Show trailer 2

Start out by giving this synopsis of the movie in your own words or if you used the first lesson in this series recap the last message.

Synopsis

In Suzanne Collins’ riveting tale of life in North America after its destruction, a powerful Capitol emerges as residents of its twelve outlying Districts individually struggle to survive under its bleak rule. Living under the constant reminder that the Capitol obliterated District 13 when the people incited a rebellion decades before, 16-year old Katniss Everdeen quietly carves out a path of meager survival for herself, her younger sister, Prim, and their widowed mother under the Capitol’s strict regime.

Each year, the Capitol assembles its Gamemakers to create an elaborate arena filled with deadly trigger points and calls upon one girl and one boy from each of the twelve Districts to play in its nationally televised Hunger Games. On the Day of Reaping when 24 children are selected to fight to the death, Katniss is whisked away from her daily quest for survival alongside her friend Gale, and thrust into the elaborate Capital as she is prepared for the Hunger Games.

In this world of instant gratification and superficial people, Katniss contends with her drunken, disengaged mentor, Haymitch, and wrestles with her feelings about her co-Tribute from District 12, Peeta Mellark. Growing up apart from Peeta in the same District, Katniss struggles to determine if Peeta is the boy who once showed her an act of kindness pivotal to her family’s survival, or if his actions are motivated to keep himself alive, as the Capital will allow only one Tribute to survive the Hunger Games’ treacherous arena.

In the days to come, Katniss must fend for her survival against the natural elements and the vicious Careers, who are Tributes who’ve trained for the Hunger Games their entire lives. Katniss meets a young Tribute whose likeness to Prim tears at her heartstrings and she continues to process what Peeta’s motives could be as the end draws near. Should she kill these two or be killed? If Katniss wins, her family will be handsomely taken care of and her District will receive the additional food it so desperately needs to survive.

Deep inside the Hunger Games, readers are treated to the witty, young mind of Katniss Everdeen, a survival-savvy girl who yearns to trust in a world that has shown her nothing of the sort.

End synopsis

This is a great movie and it ultimately has a great message. Sometimes in your life you are going to get dealt a bad hand. Sometimes you will have hardships. But the true test of who you are comes when you have to stand up for what is right… no matter the cost.

Katniss had this option. She had the option to kill Peeta and win the Hunger Games and bring about prosperity for her and for her family. But deep down she knew, like a lot of people knew, that the Hunger Games just was not right. She knew that the people in charge wanted a winner and a battle to the very death. But what would they do if they were both dead? So just like Romeo and Juliet so many years before they were going to end the movie by both eating the poisonous berries. She was going to stand up for what’s right, even though she knew that she would lose her life doing it.