Turns out someone actually created a separate sidebar for the home page, and that sidebar has another Events Calendar widget in it. Once I changed the number of events, in that instance, it worked. Too many cooks in the kitchen…
Yes, we do have the “set featured image” active on our theme (canvas, woothemes). When we create an event from the backend we have to upload the media image but from the community plug-in the image is not loaded automatically there.