I had a similar problem in an old Rails 3 stack. When these type of issues occur, my recommendation is to go onto the production server that the application is currently running in and check out which rubygems version it is using:
gem -v
For me, it was using 1.8.24. So all I needed to do is downgrade my current rubygems which was generated from "rvm install 1.9.3", when I installed the old ruby for this app. I ran the following command:
$ rvm install rubygems 1.8.24 --force
And it worked. Note I am running Ubuntu 14.04 and the server I am using is also Ubuntu.