Blessing/Wedding

I'm not sure about the religion of the characters, but the writing was neither Russian, nor Armenian. I would guess Hebrew, but I'm not sure.

I agree it looks like a Russian Orthodox priest.

The original movie script carries references to the Farmer having a Russian heritage. Although most other references to it have disppeared from the final movie, the blessing and the wedding remain.

Texas (particularly Central and Western Texas) were a real melting pot of ethnicities, as early Texas history was only rather loosely tied to either the U.S. or to Mexico. Represented ethnicities included particularly German and Czech, but also Polish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and many more (about thirty in all). So pockets of settlement with a Russian heritage seem quite believable.

Like the ones we're used to, Cyrillic letters looks quite different when presented as a) script, b) printed, or c) stylized. And Cyrillic letters have changed a great deal over the centuries, so what we may recognize as Cyrillic these days may have only a very vague similarity to how older letters looked (and I'd assume that script used in a church context would be very old). There are actually a number of slightly different Cyrillic alphabets, all based on Cyrillic script, and I don't know exactly which one is in the movie, but it does seem to me to be in the Cyrillic "family".

the script *may* be syriac, though it's not quite right (though that could be the difference between stitching it as oppose to writing it with ink). thus the farmer could be one of the assyrian xian groups. my only basis for this is that terry's parental grandparents were assyrian xian immigrants and it's not unusual for him to throw bits of his personal life (hell, *the tree of life* and *to the wonder* is the most personal of his films).