OK, get it resolved. I had a look in home.php and saw that the WP loop is removed if any of the home page widgets are active. I was sure that I wasn’t using any of them, but placed a print call to make sure. The test indicated that indeed one or more were active. Somehow, perhaps leftover from playing with the Genesis framework, a text widget was active for the Home 3 widget. Removed that and now posts and sidebar are appearing.
