Go figure... after 3 solid 8 hour days messing with everything I can think of, I found it 1 hour after posting this here. The problem is the user permissions on the redis server. Here's the example line from the redis docu Redis docu.

user sentinel-user on >somepassword allchannels +multi +slaveof +ping +exec +subscribe +config|rewrite +role +publish +info +client|setname +client|kill +script|kill