I'm going to chime in too, and say that apparently it's the Twenty Fourteen theme itself that is the problem. I don't know what Polylang is but I don't have it and I couldn't get the posts on the home page as long as it was a featured and stickified post for the grid.
I don't know why this isn't noted in big letters some where because the theme description makes you think you can do both. I wasted more than six hours on this problem as I couldn't find any info. I finally found this thread and had it fixed in an instant when I unclicked sticky and removed the feature tag.