:org can't deal with a forward reference either. It would kinda require the assembler to contain a constraint solver to support that sort of thing in full generality.
For an XO-CHIP game, I'd recommend using a pair of macros something like the following:
:calc CODE_POS { 0x200 }
:calc DATA_POS { 0x1000 }
:macro to-code { :calc DATA_POS { HERE } :org { CODE_POS } }
:macro to-data { :calc CODE_POS { HERE } :org { DATA_POS } }
The idea is to reserve the low 4kb of RAM for code, and then position all of your data afterwards. By invoking these macros in turn, we can alternate between defining data and defining code, and thus keep related information together within our source code. Then it's easy enough to define "high RAM" addresses before we need to build pointers to them, for example.
: main
jump draw-smile
to-data
: smile 0x50 0x00 0x88 0x70
to-code
: draw-smile
i := long smile
sprite v0 v0 4
This will often waste a bit of space in the gap between "code" and "data", but you can manually tweak the initial value of "DATA_POS" if things get really tight.
Make sense?
edit: And, yes, you're absolutely right: for your specific case you just have to put the lookup table in the right place. :)